Ridgewood unveils searchable parks inventory on village website, including drone videos

Ridgewood’s Parks & Recreation team on Dec. 4 demonstrated a new parks inventory and facility-management feature added to the village website that puts park locations, amenities, hours and short drone videos in a single, searchable place.

The initiative, which Director Nancy Bigos described as fulfilling action items in the village open-space master plan, combines staff work, volunteer contributions and student interns. "Each of our park properties has its own personality...for us to be able to have this information in a single place for our residents is certainly going to be a benefit," Bigos said.

Recreation staff member David Wild said the feature is an existing CivicPlus module that the village activated and populated without further license costs. "It's a feature of our current website that we turned on," Wild said, and noted the team added slideshows, links to Google Earth, amenity taxonomies and one-minute drone clips for individual parks. The site allows residents to search across parks for amenities such as playgrounds or a specified field size and to get directions.

Council members commended the volunteers and IT staff who compiled content. Council member Winograd praised the local photographers and students who contributed imagery and urged residents to try the live portal once it launches. Officials said the department will continue to refine the content and update pages as parks change or new drone footage becomes available.

The demonstration included a short aggregate video produced by the police department’s drone team and students; staff said park-specific drone snippets will be linked on each park page. The village plans to migrate the subfolder version to the main Parks & Recreation site and invited residents to suggest edits or supply seasonal photos once the site goes live.