Bloomington parks more popular due to warm weather

Bloomington area parks have been experiencing greater traffic than is usual this early in the season, said Barb Bunbar, operations coordinator for the Bloomington Parks and Recreation Department.

“I would say we’re looking at 60 to 70 percent more use of the parks than we usually have this time of year, easy,” Bunbar said.

Bunbar attributed the early increase in park-goers to the unusually nice weather, such as the several weeks in March when it was 70 or 80 degrees.

“It was crazy,” she said. “It was almost a month ago we were having that.”

She said the higher traffic has caused some challenges for the parks department.

She said they’ve been receiving calls from community members about the park facilities.

“We’ve had a lot of people calling us, wondering why restrooms aren’t open, but they pretty much opened up the same times they always do,” Bunbar said. “It’s just the weather. It jumped on us so quickly.”

She said the extra staff employed during the summer months didn’t even start until April 9, despite the high traffic.

The department has about 12 full-time, year-round employees who take care of the parks and facilities such as restrooms at the parks.

 The parks department also has 50 seasonal staff workers who do seasonal work.

 They do the extra work required during the summer months.

But Bunbar said state budget cuts have caused some changes that made the extra volume this year especially difficult.

“We had some serious budget cuts, and that hit hard on our seasonal staffing,” she said. “We had to look at starting them later and letting them go a little bit sooner.”

Another issue that has arisen due to the nice weather is a rise in vandalism at Bloomington parks, Bunbar said.

“We’ve been fighting graffiti everyday,” she said. “We’re dealing with graffiti on artwork, on the walls. It’s been very, very bad this year. It’s hard on our crew because they work so hard to keep things looking nice.”

She said they have been working with police to try and curb this issue.

“We track all our vandalism, where it’s at and the time we spent correcting it,” Bunbar said. “It takes lots of labor hours, as well as cost in product that we use.”

Even though work began early this year compared to most, Bunbar said the true parks season is yet to come. They expect attendance to stay strong.

“It’s definitely up,” she said. “It’s significantly up this early in the year.”