Ready. Set. Parks!

The dugouts at Bowen Field need to be extended to let baseball teams sit together. 

The Green needs more trash cans — with lids — to handle overflowing waste. 

A woodsy park on Russell Street needs to be surveyed to resolve a tree-cutting dispute.

And an East Shore ex-skating rink needs to be renovated into a community center — which will be renamed in part to honor a Morris Cove teen who, before his sudden death last year, spent much of his young life playing with friends in the park.

Those were among the public-greenspace-related matters discussed Wednesday during the latest monthly meeting of the Board of Park Commissioners. The meeting took place in-person in the commission’s conference room at 720 Edgewood Ave.

The commissioners didn’t take any votes on any of the items, which arose mostly during the public comments section of the meeting. 

The flurry of conversation and requests and demands and delights nevertheless underscored just how much of public and private life in the Elm City takes place in New Haven’s 142 parks. It all played out indoors, admittedly, but in front of a wall-full of windows looking out on Edgewood Park basking in a late-afternoon spring glow.

So. What were some of the parks problems and proposals posed to the commissioners Wednesday night? In chronological order of presentation, they included:

• Laila Thomas addressed the board in support of renaming the soon-to-be-renovated interior of the Salperto facility in East Shore Park after her late 15-year-old son, Zayne Ali Thomas, who was hit by a car on Townsend Avenue while riding his bike last spring. He was taken to the hospital after the crash, and died three days later.

“He lived in the Annex his whole life,” Thomas told the board members Wednesday night. ​“He was at that park every single day of his life,” playing basketball, for little league baseball, or just hanging out with friends. ​“His whole life was centered around that park,” she said.

Morris Cove Alder and Parks Commissioner Sal DeCola said that the city is in the process of converting the Salperto facility from an ex-skating rink into a community center. When that conversion is done, he said, and if the parks commission signs off on the request, the interior room of the building would be named for Zayne. He and Thomas said that Thomas’s family has started a foundation in honor of her late son, and that the foundation has committed to raising money each year to maintain the building and help out with programming.

Thomas thanked DeCola for his help with the room renaming. City Youth and Recreation Department Director Gwendolyn Busch-Williams also singled the Morris Cove alder out for praise for his work on this project.

The commission didn’t take a vote on the renaming request Wednesday, choosing to vote instead at a future meeting after the building work is complete.

• Friends of East Rock Park leader David Shimchick invited the parks commissioners to come out for an event the friends group will be hosting in East Rock on June 3 between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. The event will honor Roger Ibbotson, a Hamden resident whom Shimchick said has donated a total of $110,000 to the Friends of East Rock Park to help keep the park well-maintained. ​“He is a major donor,” Shimchick said. The group’s been looking to celebrate his parks philanthropy for years, but had been putting off a celebration due to Covid.

• Friends of Quarry Park Founder Tracy Blanford asked the commissioners for help clearly defining the boundaries of the 16-acres woodsy park on Russell Street. There’s been an ongoing debate with the park’s neighbors about the park property’s edge, she said. That’s led to neighbors cutting down trees and dumping trash on the parkland, she said. ​“We really need an identification of a park boundary.”

City Chief Landscape Architect Katherine Jacobs said that the property line would need to be surveyed.

“There must be a map” somewhere for this city property, Parks Commission Chair David Belowsky said.

DeCola pointed out that the park had been donated to the city many years ago. It used to be a privately owned quarry. He pulled up pictures of the park on his phone to show Belowsky and fellow Commissioner Carl Babb where exactly it is.

“We really just want to know where the boundary is and how we can stop the encroachment and dumping,” Blanford repeated. 

“This has been going on for years,” DeCola said. ​“It’s come to a head now.”

Belowsky promised to try to get a surveyor to take a look at the property and clearly define where things stand. Then the city staff for the commission would get back in touch with Blanford to let her know the results.

• Friends of the Green representative Geri Mauhs let the commissioners know about a waste management problem in downtown’s central park. ​“We need more trash receptacles with covered lids on the Green,” she said. The current ones in the park ​“overflow” given how much they’re used. 

“We’ll keep on that,” said recently hired city parks director Stephen Hladun. Jacobs pointed out that the city does indeed have trash cans on hand stored at the Armory.

Mauhs also passed around free packets of sunflower seeds to the commissioners and anyone else who wanted some at the meeting, encouraging them all to plant something beautiful.

• Edwin and Michelle Labrador from the Walter Pop Smith Little League spoke about the Munson Street baseball field where their young athletes play. 

“We’re looking for some improvements,” Edwin said, particularly in regard to a dangerous condition resulting from the infield dirt not being at the same level as the outfield grass.

“It’s a hazard,” Michelle said, and could lead to a baseball ricocheting up out of the infield and hurting someone.

They recognized that this and other problems with the field as it is now — like home base being out of alignment with the pitcher’s mound — ikely won’t be fixed by opening day on Saturday. But the mayor is coming to watch the opening game this weekend, Edwin added, and he’d like the field to be in presentable condition. With Fair Haven Alder and fellow Parks Commissioner Ernie Santiago speaking in support, they both pledged to work with the commission and the city to make sure repairs are made so that everything’s in good shape next season.

“This is the worst I’ve seen,” Commissioner Babb said about the Munson Street field as it stands today. ​“I would not want to be umpiring” a game there.

Belowsky thanked the two for coming to the commission meeting. ​“We’ll try to do what we can.”

• While on the theme of baseball in city parks, Babb said the recently renovated Bowen Field in Beaver Hills has a serious problem with its baseball field dugouts. They’re ​“too small,” he said. ​“It needs another six feet.” He said the city’s effort to ​“redo the field is in vain” if the dugouts aren’t extended per Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) standards. Teams need to be able to sit together in the dugout during games, he said, and the current setup doesn’t allow for that. That means Hillhouse’s baseball team ​“will be playing somewhere else” until the dugout issue is resolved.

“I heard about this [issue] after we did the renovations,” Jacobs said. She said one of the key complications is that ​“the dugouts are old, concrete, massive structures.” The expense of replacing them could be ​“exorbitant.” She promised to think this one through and find a way to make the needed changes.

Another commissioner asked what happened to the audience bleachers at Bowen Field. Where’d they go? ​“We removed them,” Hladun said, because ​“they were in disrepair.”

• Dwight resident and Friends of Kensington Playground leader Patricia Wallace addressed the board to respond to an announcement Belowsky had made earlier in the night that the board would not be endorsing a resolution the friends group had proposed.

The group, which has filed a lawsuit it filed against the city to try to stop the sale of a Dwight park to an affordable housing developer that planned to turn the public greenspace into apartments, had been looking to have the parks commission sign on to a policy proposal stating that every neighborhood in the city should have a park playground with a splashpad, playscape, and mature trees. Wallace said that, according to her group’s research, nine city neighborhoods have such playgrounds that meet all of this criteria while 11 do not.

Belowsky and Santiago pushed back on Wallace’s proposal, which the group had submitted to the board months ago, as impractical and committing the city to making expensive improvements to parks across the city without any committed funding identified. Wallace clarified that this is not an implementation plan the group has proposed, but rather a policy statement. With the support of DeCola, she pledged to work with the commission to identify the neighborhoods and public open spaces most in need of playground improvements to begin trying to put this policy into practice on a space by space basis — even though the board rejected the proposal.

Click here, here, and here to read the Friends of Kensington Playground’s research and proposals and responses to the parks board’s questions.

• Hladun and Busch-Williams closed out the meeting by giving their respective director’s reports. Two and a half months in to his new job helming the parks side of the Department of Parks & Public Works, Hladun spoke about the parks cleanup work the department is doing to get ready for the spring and summer busy seasons. Busch-Williams shined a light on her department’s goal of hiring 400 kids this summer through the Youth @ Work program.

After the last of the presentations, Belowsky asked the dozen people assembled in the audience if there was anyone else who had anything to say.

No?

Then, he concluded, ​“This meeting is adjourned.”