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Taking care of Houston’s parks and trails is nothing even remotely like a weekend in the burbs, where lawn crews and homeowners mow and trim for a few hours and call it a day.
Upkeep of the city’s 382 parks and more than 190 miles of trails is a seven-day-a-week job performed by roughly 240 workers. The annual cost: $25.5 million.
“People take some of our work for granted until it doesn’t get done,” said Eric Spurgeon, division manager at the Greenspace Management Division within the Houston Parks and Recreation Department. “You’ve got thousands and thousands of acres in all these parks. You’ve got a large city with a lot of infrastructure and a lot of traffic. And the weather is changing constantly. And then you may have a little upwards of 200 people doing all of this work. So, it’s a lot of work.”
Greenspace Management is the largest division in the Parks and Recreation Department, consuming nearly a quarter of its $108 million budget.
Just under two-thirds of the Greenspace Management Division’s budget goes toward employee pay and benefits. Another $7 million goes to such things as vehicle repairs, refuse disposal, electricity and real estate leases. The remaining $1.2 million or so is spent on supplies and equipment, including trimmers, blowers and pole saws.
Beyond landscaping the more than 25,000 acres of parks and greenspaces, Spurgeon’s crews also have to deal with litter.
“People use our parks and esplanades as illegal dumping sites, so it makes it hard to maintain sites when people pull into our parking lots and just unload the back of their truck because they want to save a few dollars not going to the dump,” Spurgeon said. “We have to pick up all that litter before we mow … If people would just use the trash can, we could cut a lot more grass.”
Houston’s sometimes extreme weather doesn’t help, either.
“Unfortunately, when storms hit, the bad part is when the big trees fall and it takes a lot of work,” Spurgeon said. “People might have lost one tree in their yard, but we had a park that lost hundreds of trees. You’d be shocked at how a weather event can really impact our schedules and the massive amount of work that we have to do to get the parks back in shape.”
It doesn’t get much easier when it isn’t raining.
“Turnover rate is high. It’s really hot outside. It’s hard work. Really sweaty, dirty work, you know. People get upset.”
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