St. Mary—s Recreation & Parks plans Civic Plus switch, aims for Dec. 18 full launch

Recreation & Parks staff briefed the St. Mary—s County citizens advisory commission on plans to switch the department—s registration and facility-reservation services to Civic Plus, a cloud-based recreation-management platform, with a phased rollout scheduled for mid- to late-December.

The department plans to begin public marketing the week of Nov. 17 and give residents approximately one month to create new household accounts before registrations and facility-reservation functions go live. Staff emphasized that existing accounts will not be migrated automatically and that users should set up new accounts during the account-creation window.

"We're gonna launch in December," the Recreation & Parks staff member said, describing Civic Plus as a "back end management system for all of our programs and offerings" that will support program registration, facility reservations and household-account management. The staff member said the platform responds to the department—s earlier strategic-plan findings that online registration needed improvement.

The department outlined a multi-step transition schedule: an initial public marketing push starting the week of Nov. 17; a period for residents to set up accounts; an early-December cutoff for online program registrations; a credit-card transaction shutoff on Dec. 10 to change processors; an IT installation and staff training window; an open-house soft launch at facilities on Dec. 16; and a full public launch on Dec. 18.

On security and payment processing, a board member asked how payment information would be handled. The staff member said payment data "is completely encrypted" and that Civic Plus allows users to save a payment method on their household account so they do not have to re-enter it for each transaction. The vendor also includes accessibility tools the department identified as beneficial during procurement.

The county will accept Visa, Mastercard and Discover with American Express under active review. The staff member said whether other payment apps (for example, Google Pay) will be available to users depends on how people log in and the vendor—s integration; staff will confirm details with the finance and IT teams before launch.

The Recreation & Parks staff also said the Department of Aging will use the same Civic Plus instance, creating a single sign-on experience for residents who access both departments— services through the platform. The golf course will be handled separately: the golf operation is pursuing a golf-specific product that uses a different procurement model, in which the vendor would be compensated through a percentage of tee-time sales and related processing.

Staff warned customers about service pauses during the conversion: pass purchases will be cut off during migration but passes already purchased will continue to be honored at facilities. Staff plans outreach (email, posters, social outreach, targeted meetings with league leaders) and a recorded public Zoom demonstration to ease the transition.

The department asked residents and league leaders to create new household accounts during the pre-launch window and said staff will hold training sessions for field-reservation users and league administrators.

What's next: staff will return to the advisory board in December with a live demonstration and more detailed operational guidance about payment options, the exact last dates for online registrations and passes, and any post-launch troubleshooting steps.