Parks director tells council budget is largely flat but warns of costly tree removals, Grove Park work

Steve Hutton, director of Parks and Recreation, told the Jackson City Council in a departmental budget hearing that the department’s operating request for fiscal 2026 is largely flat compared with 2025, but that several one-time project funds and urgent maintenance needs will require targeted spending. Hutton outlined plans to map park assets, reissue Grove Park bids, address more than 500 dead trees across city parks and expand revenue efforts at Pete Brown Golf Course.

Hutton said the department moved unused salary and wage funds into an overtime line and ran Saturday crews beginning in July to catch up deferred maintenance, adding, “We typically have about 15 to 20 men that are volunteering for overtime on any given Saturday, and we’re getting very close to being caught up.”

The nut of the issue is that the operating budget itself is mostly unchanged year over year, while a separate pool of insurance-settlement and project funds will finance capital work. Hutton said a line that appears large on the budget (a page showing many zeroed recurring line items and larger 2026 project numbers) reflects sums from that insurance settlement earmarked for Grove Park, pool renovations, baseball-field work and lighting, not recurring increases to the department’s base budget.

Most immediately, Hutton said the department has flagged 502 dead trees in city parks; Jamie Fowler Boyle Park alone holds 185 of those trees. He gave a vendor-based cost range for removals of roughly $900–$950 per tree and said some vendors will do work closer to $800 per tree, a scale that would put immediate removals in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars. Hutton said the department…