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In an ongoing effort to spur discussion on possibly changing the structure of the Smithville Park Board, Alderman Bob Foreman brought a few guests to the board’s Nov. 9 meeting.

At the invite of Foreman, who is also a member of Smithville Friends of the Parks, Chad Nixon, a former park board president in Odessa, and Lindsey Adams, director of the parks department in Odessa, spoke to the board about that city’s transition from an advisory body, like the Smithville Park Board, to an administrative body with control over its own, separate budget.

According to Nixon, Odessa went from having a park department with one employee and a budget of $65,000 a year as an advisory body to having a budget of $500,000 a year and 50 employees as an administrative body.

That jump, Nixon said, made them the biggest department in the city and was facilitated by a sales tax the department passed with a four to one margin in the city after about eight months of campaigning.

However, Adams said the tax generates only half of the department’s income and the department generates the rest of its budget by running most of the city’s youth recreation leagues in-house to produce revenue. The only leagues the department doesn’t run are football and wrestling, Adams said.

The additional revenue streams and control, Nixon said, allowed the department to start a number of projects it otherwise couldn’t have such as building an outdoor swimming pool.

All in all, Nixon and Adams said the switch from an advisory to an administrative body worked out well for their park department and allowed them to expand their park system considerably.

Sheri Chapman, chairman of the Smithville Park Board, said the board has been tentatively discussing the idea of changing the structure of the park board for some time and she asked Foreman to invite the officials from Odessa to the meeting to talk about their experiences with a transition to give them a real world example of the switch.

“We’ve been on the edge of do we take steps to change the board or not and if we know of someone who has looked into the initiative, we want to hear from them,” she said. “We got some feedback on an example of where it’s worked and it’s always good to get resources.”

However, Chapman said the board does not plan to take up the issue of changing the board’s structure anytime soon and the presentation was purely educational.

“It’s a large project,” she said. “Honestly, I don’t anticipate this as something to jump into in the next year.”

Right now, Chapman said, the Park Board is more worried about creating a new master plan before examining the idea of changing the board’s structure. The current parks master plan, Chapman said, has been rendered obsolete because 95 percent of the goals set out in it have been completed.

The Park Board is looking into financing a survey to help facilitate a new master plan.

Staff writer Michael Westblade can be reached at 389-6636 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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