Just as Mission Playground at 19th and Linda streets begins community planning for a $7.5 million comprehensive restoration, the city’s strained budget has slashed staffing and put the available hours of the park at risk.
The Mission District 98,000 sq.ft facility has gone from 3.5 full-time staff members to one summer hire.
“It’s going to be up to the community to advocate” for how many staff members they want in the park, Linda Bernard, who oversees several park areas in the city. “Ideally, there should be four staff here.”
Bernard said she used to supervise 31 directors, but layoffs that began in February have left her with eight.
One of those let go was Oscar Coronado, who worked with the Recreation and Parks for 28 years, and whose last day of work as an assistant director at Mission Playground was May 22.
“If it weren’t for the parks, my life would have been completely different,” said Coronado, the brother of Jose Coronado, whose work with the soccer program won him the naming honor for the park at 21st and Folsom.
“The community is the one that loses,” Coronado said in a telephone interview before boarding a plane for Oregon. “It’s sad that suddenly everything’s gone.”
The directors, he said, are “a buffer zone between the gang bangers” hanging around the park and the kids who use them.
To help close a gaping hole in the city’s budget, the Recreation and Parks Department laid off 78 park directors and assistant directors in the last six months. The directors supervise the parks and implement programming for the kids that use them.
The community will get the chance to advocate for staff when the Budget and Finance Committee of the Board of Supervisors meets to discuss the Recreation and Parks budget on June 17th and 24th.
Currently only Daniel Ruiz, a 15-year veteran supervisor, is employed at Mission Playgrounds, and his contract is only good through the summer, he said.
Mission Playgrounds has the only outdoor public pool in San Francisco and its unclear how its hours will be affected.
Staffing, Bernard said, can be the difference between keeping facilities open 12 hours a day, six days a week and three hours a day, five days a week.
“I probably would have been in a gang right now,” if it wasn’t for Ruiz and the other supervisors, said Salvador Huerta, who played in the park’s basketball leagues and helped with events such as the annual haunted house at Mission Rec Center.
“He had me do homework,” Huerta, now 20, said. Ruiz was “like a father figure.”
“My whole career has been a success story,” said Ruiz, dressed in a black STAFF Rec and Parks Department hoodie. In his 15 years of service, he has lost only four of the hundreds of kids he’s worked with to gang activity.
In Mission Playground on a Wednesday evening, several young men played soccer, tennis and basketball as a young boy unsteadily rode his tiny bicycle around the soccer courts.
Inside, about 40 community members gathered to discuss the planned renovation, that will mean, among other things, a complete rehashing of the clubhouse and artificial turf installed on the soccer courts.
The renovations are funded by the Clean and Safe Neighborhood Parks Bond passed in 2008, which scored 12 parks on renovation need using criteria such as earthquake safety, population density, repair needs and amenities offered.
Mission Playground finished second out of the 12 parks evaluated, finishing only behind the Chinese Rec Center in Chinatown.
Towards the end of a meeting dominated by adults, one boy stood up to make a comment.
“Are we going to get our studio back?”
Cesar Bermudez, 15, learned audio production from Ruiz and the other directors using a makeshift recording studio set up in a room shared with gardening supplies. He’s since earned an internship with the Bay Area Video Coalition and is taking production classes at John O’Connell High School.
The cuts that have limited his time at the park, means Ruiz has been unable to man the studio, but he’s adamant about keeping it.
So are the kids, who recorded an album of songs centered around their lives in the parks.
Imagine waking up one song begins, and finding the parks closed. Without that outlet, what happens to the kids?
“Look at the bigger picture,” Ruiz said as kids walked in and out of the park office to go play basketball, or swing at tennis balls with a baseball bat.
“If these kids aren’t here, imagine what’s going to happen.”
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