8 Thursday, August 6, 2020
Coastal View News • Carpinteria, California
Finding confidence to play during a pandemic Q & A with city of Carpinteria Parks & Rec Director Matt Roberts
BY DEBRA HERRICK Carpinteria is known as a paradise for outdoor play, from swimming to tennis, jogging, hiking and cycling. The city’s Parks & Recreation Department oversees many of the open spaces for leisure and athletic activity, along with the community pool, aquatics and Junior Lifeguards program. During the pandemic, the department has had to make swift adaptations and difficult choices to keep Carpinterians safe and programs running, including suspending JGs temporarily after a counselor came in contact with someone who tested positive for Covid-19. CVN spoke with Parks & Recreation Director Matt Roberts to learn more about how the department is responding to public health orders and the needs of the community. CVN: Covid-19 has had a big impact on Parks & Recreation. How prepared do you think you were as a department for the pandemic? Matt Roberts: The pandemic is a unique circumstance that we didn’t predict. All city staff participates in emergency disaster training to a standard in compliance with state and federal law. We conduct emergency exercises, and in the past few years, we have used our training to deal with severe drought, the Thomas Fire, the Montecito Debris Flow Disaster, and now the pandemic. Our training helped to focus our management skills to do what we thought was best for our residents in terms of protecting public health and community. Can you imagine we closed the City Beach on the Fourth of July? In this case, the city acted in concert with all other adjacent waterfront agencies to protect public health. Tell us about the major changes you’ve had to make due to Covid-19 and how your team responded to these. What have been the biggest challenges for your department? Most everything is now operating in a nonroutine way. One of our biggest challenges has been to work with our staff to adopt health department orders and keep our staff and the parks patrons safe. We are on the lookout for new information about Covid-19 and continuously adapting our tactics to improve. Our effort paid off as we felt we had tactics to open the community pool as soon as the Health Department said we could. We began our modified Junior Lifeguard Program likewise. But because we aren’t in any form of routine, and our work effort may need to be shifted from planning a youth program to closing a beach, we are challenged to stay fully informed and to implement new instructions forthwith but carefully. How would you describe the morale of Parks staff & lifeguards this summer? The morale of the group is good. From the pool staff to the ocean lifeguards, everyone is doing a yeoman’s effort. This emergency continues to teach us all enduring lessons, but one that is amazing to me is how much people insist on the benefits of parks and recreation programming. Every park and recreation agency in Santa Barbara County join in a biweekly conference call to share Covid-19 strategies, and we are all hearing strong demand for park operations to get back to normal. The demand to swim in the pool is a great example. How were you feeling when JGs started this summer during a pandemic?
HERRICK
Matt Roberts oversees the Parks & Recreation Department for the city of Carpinteria. Beginning a modified program in this pandemic required significant “retooling” to comply with state and county health orders. In addition, we needed to see how it would work in the field. I felt confident that we could start the program safely and the Junior Lifeguard staff has met the challenge. The program has added a new field of instruction. We have always taught ocean safety and now have added instruction in Covid-19 prevention to the participants. And then when you closed and reopened again? Tell us about the thinking process behind those decisions. We suspended the program when we had reason to believe an exposure had occurred. We knew an exposure was a possibility and took the safest option in suspending the program until we could verify no one was infected. The program restarted today (Aug. 3), and if we get unfortunate information about another possible exposure, we will suspend it again. Some readers have commented that there shouldn’t be camps running this summer or that JGs and counselors have been seen at the beach close together and without masks. How do you respond to that? We have conducted specific staff training on Covid-19 prevention measures and have provided masks to all of our staff. We have also provided hand sanitizer and now teach our JGs how to use it much like how to use sunscreen. It is our new way of doing business. Our instructors have been asked to wear their masks when social distancing is difficult. We do not require them to wear a mask
when running or swimming or warming down. They should be keeping their distance when not wearing a mask. We are asking all the participants to do the same. Tell us about the aquatics program. How are the Covid-19 restrictions impacting the pool? Is it still difficult for swimmers to reserve a spot or has demand lessened in recent weeks?
meeting process has reinvented itself due to Covid and public health concerns and these projects require a solid public process. The city continues to evolve how to conduct virtual meetings and hopes to move these projects forward soon. Do you have any new programs coming up that have been designed specifically with the pandemic context in mind?
The day when the city (along with all public pools in the county) was ordered to close was the day we started to make plans to reopen. When the health order came out that we could reopen, we were ready and the first pool in Santa Barbara or Ventura counties to do so. This was good news for our avid swimmers, but we did not anticipate that many folks would drive a long way from out of town to swim. It took about a month for other regional pools to reopen so that those distant swimmers would swim in their local pool and free up space in Carpinteria’s pool. Now that that has occurred getting a reservation to swim is easier. We are still required to allow only one swimmer per lane and the most popular times do fill up. We are also running our age group swim team and some aqua aerobic classes with the same restrictions. The good news is that we are getting a lot of people into the water.
We are busy adapting existing programs to comply with Covid-19 prevention protocols when possible. I hope we can continue to move toward serving more community members while we wade our way through this pandemic and look forward to a post Covid-19 time ahead. We can get there sooner if we all practice good public health protocols.
What do Carpinterians have to look forward to this fall from Parks & Rec?
People from all over the US are coming to Carpinteria to vacation. Consider doing the same. No airports, no planes, no strange cities: Just Carpinteria. Stay at our beaches for your 2020 vacation. Call us for availability of our beach area rentals. (Subject to state and county Covid-19 restrictions)
I am pleased that we have obtained permits for the Skate Park and are looking for funding to build it. This may take some time, but I think that will be an awesome outcome. We are also developing some specific concepts for dog parks and trails among other things. The public
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