New Castle County parks division details staffing, maintenance costs and upcoming projects

Kendall Summers, parks division manager for the New Castle County Department of Public Works, told the county’s Public Works Committee that the division is responsible for about 251 park parcels covering just over 6,000 acres and is facing growing maintenance and contracting costs as usage rises.

Summers said the parks division has three planning staff, a permits office and an operations and maintenance section that deploys crews in three regions across the county. “I’m Kendall Summers. I’m the parks division manager,” Summers said as she began the update. She told the committee the division employs 76 full-time staff in total, about 68 of whom are field personnel on a typical day, but that number is reduced by an average of about 10 absences daily and by current vacancies.

The update laid out recurring maintenance work and associated costs. Summers said about 1,700 acres of the county’s parkland is mowable; roughly 700 of those mowable acres are contracted to outside vendors at about $32.50 an acre, with the county paying roughly $450,000 a year for contractual mowing. The division’s trash contracts run about $100,000 annually, and mulch used as playground safety surfacing and for decorative landscapes totals about 10 acres; refilling to the division’s 6-inch depth standard requires more than 8,000 cubic yards per year at a cost Summers called “almost $300,000.” Summers also told the committee that the…