Caption lakeblue: Acting Parks Director James P. Burke
As we enter 2013, the Parks and Recreation Department is wrapping up the second year of an ambitious Strategic Plan that guides and focuses our staff of more than a thousand on the work they do every day. We have an awesome responsibility as stewards of our thousands of acres of parks and desert preserves and our dozens of community centers and recreation facilities as well as our classes and sports program. Though our strategic plan is a roadmap for continually making our department better and committing to it, we took steps this year to take responsibility for its success.
In the past year, we’ve improved accountability by adding strategic plan implementation to staff performance management guidelines and managers performance achievement plans.
We have continued our focus on improving customer service and staff training. All staff went through a customized customer service training and we spend much of the year putting together specialized training for our supervisors and managers. All of our supervisors and managers will take this new training in 2013. We also continued to rotate our recreation and maintenance staff last year to give employees crucial exposure to other areas of our operation and of the city, and we will be expanding staff rotations in 2013 to even more staff.
Enjoy our Annual Report; it outlines how we moved forward in 2012 and details how many lives we touched.
James P. Burke
