Parks make use of prisoners, volunteers

Albemarle officials are asking volunteers and jail inmates to be caretakers of county parks.

“Especially now, during the hard budget times, we’re really trying to work with volunteers as much as we can,” said Tucker Rollins, a parks service officer.

Volunteers have labored about 1,500 hours since the beginning of 2008, according to Parks and Recreation officials. Local inmates have clocked in about 19,000 hours since 2004.

Volunteers have already donated about 420 hours since January working on the 10 or 11 miles of trails that the county plans to build at Preddy Creek Park, Rollins said. Workers are expected to finish constructing the trails and a parking lot by late summer or early fall.

Volunteers are building a massive trail designed for hikers, bicyclists and horseback riders in the woods along the perimeter of the 452-acre park, with numerous smaller trails attached. The park, which borders Orange County, is a rustic natural area with a stream running through the center of the property.

Many of the projects at the county’s parks would not have been possible if it weren’t for volunteers, said county spokeswoman Lee Catlin, adding that “we don’t otherwise have the funds to do it.

“When you look at the kind of time and money that we’re saving with what they’re doing, we wouldn’t have Preddy Creek Park,” she said, “and we wouldn’t have the trail system that we have at the other parks either.”

Catlin estimated that 1,347 hours of volunteer work at the parks saved the county about $25,000 during the past year. That estimate doesn’t include an additional 165 hours of free labor from dozens of volunteers who worked on a trail at Preddy Creek Park in February.

Bob Crickenberger, deputy director of Albemarle Parks and Recreation, said that work at the parks by jail inmates has probably saved the county $75,000 to $100,000 since 2004, noting that the figure is a rough estimate.

Inmates do a lot of maintenance on park grounds, including mowing grass, constructing nature trails and taking care of buildings and other infrastructure at the parks.

A recently released efficiency review recommended that the county have inmates do even more labor on park and school grounds, and suggested Albemarle’s Parks and Recreation Department collaborate more with Charlottesville. Crickenberger said that the county already collaborates with the city on a laundry list of recreational activities, but said that Albemarle may consider more ways to work with the city.

The county started seeking park volunteers a couple of years ago, Crickenberger said. In a 2004 study of the county’s recreational facilities, 63 percent of users ranked nature centers, natural areas and nature trails as the highest recreational need in the county.

“We’re mobilizing the community to essentially provide this need that everybody’s looking for,” said Dan Mahon, the greenways planner for the Parks and Recreation Department.

Mahon said that many of the volunteers have earned a sense of ownership by building the trails, and volunteer days have served as social events.

“It’s amazing to see such happy, satisfied people walking away from a hard day’s work,” Mahon said.

The next volunteer day at Preddy Creek Park is from 9 a.m. to noon on March 21.