Dear Menlo Park City Council Members,
AFSCME is writing you to express our concerns about a new position in the budget for the Senior Program Assistant for the Recreation Department. As you may remember, returning it to a Recreation Coordinator classification was discussed at length at the June 8th Council Meeting. We want to thank the three of you who voted to amend it. But, at the last Council meeting, it was not changed to a Recreation Coordinator in the documents provided by City staff. City staff asked you to approve the 6 FTE positions requested for Library and Community Services but did not include the change from Senior Program Assistant to Rec Coordinator. We ask that you revisit this and ensure that the classification is changed back to a Recreation Coordinator before adopting the budget.
We would also like to take this opportunity to clarify some information from the June 8th Council Meeting. Mr. Reinhart attested that the reasoning for downgrading the position while the core job duties stayed the same was the lack of supervision required. We want to state that supervision of staff is required to run each and every event. Supervision of temp and full-time staff ranges from 3-60 staff members per event.
We have also included the information for our previous email for easy reference.
We believe the decision to reclassify this position to a senior Program Assistant is short sighted for several reasons:
1. A study done by Koff and Associates in 2015 deemed that the Recreation Coordinator classification was accurate for this role and job duties, and this was before adding several events to the line-up.
2. The City has a goal to have large scale events by December, and the Performance Center by July. These kinds of events takes months of applications, permitting and planning. Some of the permitting duties have already been absorbed by other coordinators.
3. The Special Events Rec Coordinator offers a level of expertise and complexity to outside events involving community partners, grants, sponsors and permits and moving forward COVID compliance.
Also attached is the detailed description of the work that use to be done and presumably will continue to be done sometime in the near future.
Thank you for your time and consideration,
Ashley Mates
She/her
Staff Representative
AFSCME District Council 57
ashley.mates@ca.afscme57.org
https://www.afscme57.org/
cell: 510-220-7992
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