SKiP Playground: The Saddest Case of Council Dysfunction
Arguing over process caused unreasonable delay in project
To understand the type of dysfunction that has plagued the relationship between Stow City Council and the administration, one need look no further than the rebuilding of SKiP park.
The park, located in the city center on Darrow Rd., was first built in 1991 through a public-private partnership. It was used by tens of thousands of children for 26 years, until the wooden structure was deemed to be no longer safe and was torn down in 2017.
The new park, the centerpiece of what the administration hopes will become a vibrant city center with various amenities for all Stow residents, opened on July 2, 2023, six years after the close of the original park.
Why would it take six years to rebuild a playground?
Two words: Money and Control.
A Rough Start
For much of the time since it was determined that SKiP would need to be replaced, council and the administration have been struggling over the process and funding for the project.
From the start, City Council has resisted efforts to have the city fund rebuilding of the park. After various discussions, efforts began in earnest in July 2019 after City Council approved an ordinance requested by the mayor for the city to match any donated funds for the project up to $75,000, a show of faith to private donors that the city had skin in the game. The mayor accepted the challenge of fundraising for the project, with donations from local businesses. The initial expected cost at that time was $450,000. By the time it was built four years later, however, the park cost about $650,000.
Plans for the design of the park came together after a Jan. 26, 2020, Play for All Visioning Day and Pizza Palooza event at Stow-Munroe Falls High School, where kids and adults could provide input into what features they wanted at the park. Voted No. 1 by participants was a splash pad.
The mayor secured a promise for the first $160,000 in donations and then calamity struck: COVID-19. Amidst the uncertainty of how severe the national crisis would become, on May 14, 2020, City Council voted to rescind the ordinance for the city to match up to $75,000, and the mayor halted his fundraising. At the time that City Council decided it wouldn’t match donations up to $75,000, the city had a general budget carryover from 2019 into 2020 of $6.2 million.
An Attempted Re-Start
The administration renewed efforts to re-start fundraising for the playground project in October 2020. By that time, plans for the park had solidified and been pared down. Despite community support for a splash pad, it was removed from the plans because it lacked enough support in council.
In the October 22, 2020, Public Improvements Committee of Council, several issues were discussed:
The importance of using the Parks and Recreation Board, an all-volunteer commission appointed by the mayor and made up of Stow residents, to provide input to the project and provide final approval of all plans before being voted on by City Council;
Several councilmembers’ concerns that the SKiP project not interfere with maintenance needs at other parks (even though SKiP was being funded entirely by private donations);
Council’s interest in getting regular updates about the project;
Public Service Director Nick Wren outlined the need for a City Council to approve a resolution in support of rebuilding SKiP park before the mayor could solicit funds so that donating foundations or businesses would have the assurance that their funds would be used for that purpose.
Councilman At-Large Jeremy McIntire acknowledged that it wouldn’t make sense for the mayor to seek funding without council’s support of the project, and then gave reasons why he couldn’t fully support the project at that time.
Ward 3 Councilman Steve Hailer emphasized the importance of everyone getting on the same page so that the project could move forward.
At the end of council’s comments, Public Improvements Chair Mario Fiocca closed the discussion without a motion to take any specific action on Wren’s request for a resolution of support for the project.
See the council and administration’s discussion at the October 22, 2020, Public Improvements Committee meeting (you'll need to click the YouTube link in the box below to view):
The Nov. 12, 2020, Public Improvements Committee meeting had one agenda item, to discuss progress on the SKiP project. Councilman Hailer addressed steps he felt were necessary to keep the project moving forward, while Wren explained the process for how the projected details would be fleshed out, in part, by companies bidding on the project. Director of Parks and Recreation Linda Nahrstedt explained the work that had already been done by an ad-hoc SKiP planning committee of Stow residents, along with the administration and Parks & Recreation Board:
New Year, Old Issue
In January 2021, three months after the initial request that council provide a resolution in support of the project, Wren was at the Public Improvements Committee meeting to make the request again.
While council was looking for specific details about what types of equipment would be included in the park and how much everything would cost in order to vote on a resolution of support of the project, Wren explained that those details couldn’t be determined until the city knew the size of the project based on the total amount of donations secured.
Mayor Pribonic discussed the vision for the project, to create a playground that would stand out among other playgrounds in surrounding communities, appeal to a broader age group of up to 12 years old and be inclusional to appeal to children of varying capabilities.
Councilman McIntire questioned what information the mayor was using to secure commitments for donations and whether council was being left out of the loop. Parks & Rec Director Nahrstedt explained that all information provided to donors had previously been provided to council and that the information that had been provided to council was as far as the administration could go without having council’s support and to begin the bid process. Councilman Hailer suggested that he and Fiocca get together with the mayor and Wren to discuss the best path forward, expressing an interest in getting the project moving forward.
See the full discussion during the January 14, 2021, Public Improvements Committee meeting:
At the Public Improvements Committee meeting on January 28, 2021, Hailer reviewed the progress on the various steps for the project that he’d originally outlined the prior October. As many of those steps had been completed or were well in hand, he acknowledged that it made sense that City Council should formally support the project in order for Mayor Pribonic to complete the fundraising. However, he voiced concern that he and other council members wanted the administration to provide additional detail on the different costs for the project before offering the support the administration needed to get donations.
So, in other words, before formally supporting the project to rebuild SKiP, which would enable the mayor to secure private donations, City Council wanted to approve a detailed budget even though the city wouldn’t be funding it. And, the administration could not go through the effort of getting quotes on a half-million-dollar project without knowing exactly how much funding it could raise and whether council would approve it.
Hailer reiterated that the expertise for the project resided within the administration and that council respected the work and input of all the various stakeholders in the project, but then repeated that council wanted more details before they would vote to support it.
See the full discussion during the January 28, 2021, Public Improvements Committee meeting:
Why the Lengthy Back-and-Forth?
The meetings reviewed thus far highlight a fundamental lack of respect and distrust by a majority of council for members of the administration, including non-elected, long-time city employees whose expertise in their field of responsibility council refuses to accept and rely upon. (That lack of respect for long-time employees became particularly clear in 2023 when council delayed a new compensation plan for non-bargaining employees and ultimately approved the plan only after cutting many of the recommended pay raises. See related story.)
Councilman Hailer summed up the position of the majority of council by saying that if he were a lender and this were a commercial loan or if he were an investor, they would want the kind of detail council was seeking for a $500,000 project.
Here is the failed logic in this argument:
The City of Stow was not funding the park and council was not the lender or investor;
This was not an investment -- it was a donation; donors were not expecting to see a “return-on-investment” other than completion of the playground according to the plans outlined by the administration;
None of the donors to whom Mayor Pribonic was discussing the project had asked for the level of detail that City Council wanted;
As the person who solicited the donations, it was Mayor Pribonic who had a responsibility to ensure that the donors' funds were properly used, which was why the administration insisted on a resolution of support to ensure they'd be used for the playground and not go into the general fund.
While claiming to support the project, council continued to rehash the same issues in every meeting, voicing concerns about how the money would be spent even though the project would be entirely funded by donations.
Their concerns were disingenuous; it was the mayor, not council, who had been spearheading the project and developing the relationships with companies and private donors to secure the funding and who would be accountable to those donors, other stakeholders and the community for the success of the project. This was purely a way for council to exert budgetary authority over the administration just for the sake of having control.
In the end, the administration agreed to put together an information packet for discussion in March 2021, after it had completed work on required capital budgets for the year.
Continued Struggle over Controlling the How and the When
Two weeks later, Fiocca asked Wren whether council’s request to see more information by early March would be met. Wren said he’d not received responses from everyone on council on an email he’d sent asking them for specific direction on the information they wanted, which might delay his ability to meet their deadline.
McIntire suggested that council didn’t need to provide Wren with any specific direction, that the presentation the administration had previously provided council should be enough for the administration to seek bids on the project. That’s when a clearly frustrated Wren pointed out that the city never seeks bids on a project without council’s prior support for the project or the funding with which to pay for it. He said he’d been told at the last council meeting to put together more information for council, but now was being told that more information wasn’t necessary. He reiterated that council was approaching this backwards, that they needed to provide a resolution of support so that the funds could be collected and a final budget set and then bids would be sent out that would be reviewed and approved by the Parks & Recreation Board and then by council.
Several councilmembers expressed a willingness to get a resolution of support put together while Hailer continued with requests for more project cost detail.
McIntire asked to have the administration commit to a project timeline as part of getting the resolution of support. Wren pointed out that there was no way to know how long it would take to raise the necessary funds, making setting any sort of timeline an impossible task. He also explained why the administration needed council’s resolution for support – that a prior council had rejected plans for the park after funds had been committed, causing the process to be started over under the current council.
Wren offered to write the resolution and it was agreed that he would work with the law department to do just that.
The discussion was lengthy and heated, rehashed the same issues dating back to October and went around in circles. Enter at your own risk:
The February 25, 2021, Public Improvements Committee meeting should have been the point at which the project would finally move forward. The administration had prepared a resolution for council to approve the project, but Wren said he would not present it because he’d learned just before the meeting that an alternative resolution had been written by McIntire that went far beyond the support that the administration needed to get fundraising started. McIntire’s version of the resolution required:
That the mayor would have 1 month to secure $500,000 in donations;
The project (funded entirely by donations and not the city) would be capped at a cost of $500,000 (even if additional funds were secured);
The administration would provide a detailed timeline outlining major milestones through the project’s completion.
What had started as a request for a resolution of support turned into a detailed, legislated to-do list for the mayor.
McIntire explained that the resolution he offered had been submitted to the law department, which had reviewed and made changes that he felt would be palatable to the administration.
See the meeting minutes from the March 11 Public Improvements Committee to view the three different versions of the resolution. The first resolution in the minutes is what the administration proposed; the second resolution is the one McIntire wrote and the third one was the version edited by the law department.
See the heated discussion about the resolution:
With an interest in keeping the project moving forward, the mayor said the administration would review McIntire’s resolution.
A Path Forward
The March 11, 2021, Public Improvements Committee meeting marked a clear breakthrough in the five-month impasse between council and the administration.
Nahrstedt and Wren provided a presentation that included a general budget for the project, the cost of which was now expected to be $600,000. And the administration decided to accept the terms of the revised resolution written by McIntire and amended by the law department.
Hailer suggested that the city should kick in $125,000 for the project; council ultimately voted on a motion by Councilman At-Large Cyle Feldman that an amendment be added that would enable the city to fund any shortfall in fundraising in order to ensure the completion of the project. Ultimately, the park was entirely funded by donations.
See the council discussion:
Lesson Learned?
The five-months of wrangling over the process for approving the rebuilding of SKiP park was the last chapter of a years-long effort by the administration to get the project going.
Although this piece focuses on the deliberations done by the prior council whose term ran from Jan. 2020- Jan. 2022, several key figures in this episode (Fiocca, McIntire, Harrison) remain on council today.
This example of council indecision, obstruction and micromanaging wasn’t an anomaly; in fact, it’s become a feature of the current council. (See how council delayed voting on a new compensation plan for Stow workers for five months.)
The new SKiP park by all accounts is a success. Stow families wanted the new park and the administration obtained significant input from residents, an ad-hoc SKiP park committee and the city’s Parks & Recreation Board to ensure what would be built would meet the needs of the community.
Through all of that, council, while continuously voicing its support of the project, continued to delay and insert itself unnecessarily into details that were already being managed by members of the administration who have expertise in those areas. While the resulting park is a bright spot for the City of Stow, the amount of time it took council to give the mayor the approval he needed to get the project done was shameful.
Stow residents deserve better.
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