Reorganizing the Chicago Park District: From Patronage to Professional Status

The purpose of this article is to understand why many large, urban park districts have failed to provide high-quality recreation programming, taught by trained professionals and improved through outreach and staff development. As a case study to be analyzed, the Chicago Park District, one of the largest urban public park districts in the world with 3,000 full-time and 3,000 seasonal employees, has been slow in hiring professionally-trained recreation employees with higher education backgrounds and slow in correcting the current politically based practice. As a consequence, the hiring of ill-trained employees has impacted recreation as a field of study in colleges and universities within the Chicago metropolitan service area, rendering some programs inactive and others restricted. This discussion will be presented in order to shed light on issues which plague many metropolitan recreation and park districts while offering a number of solutions and their implications for researchers and practitioners. Why Reorganize the Chicago Park District? Following the national social reform movement of the 1880s, new parks in Chicago were developed to provide open and green spaces as well as educational and social contexts for leisure that included a heavy emphasis on active or physical recreation, primarily indoor athletics. Buildings, called fieldhouses, were built and subsequently this development called for employees to staff these sites (Henderson, 1998). Having evolved over the years, today's culture of government in Chicago, including the Chicago Park District, was derived almost exclusively from Democratic machine politics, a system that established its control in the 1930s. The primary method of control was patronage, which meant handing out government jobs as political favors (Guterbock, 1980). Park operations were top-down and cumbersome with a centralized system that left little room for timeliness and efficiency. Bound by patronage rules of conduct, job accountability did not include systematic employee performance evaluations or client needs and satisfaction assessments. Letters of introduction and requests for hire were given by aldermen or committeemen for positions ranging from recreation leader to art instructor, cluster manager to citywide director of recreation. In many instances, systematic discrimination existed for those who did not look, act or think like those in power. This culture has remained over the past 60 years despite serious efforts to change it. Those who received job appointments, even if advertised and competed for, have not customarily had professional credentials in Parks and Recreation, either with degrees, membership in professional associations, or certified leisure professional status. In addition, without the approval of the local ward office, virtually no credence was given to those who had gone to a university to receive training. With a degree being unnecessary, little was expected in the way of professional accountability. Without monumental reform efforts and with only a few exceptions, the apathy and lack of a skilled workforce meant years of low-quality programming, unresponsive employees, and dirty as well as unsafe parks (Park Management Administrative Manual of Policies, Procedures and Systems, March 1988). How the Reorganization Evolved Early reform measures were met with little or no significant improvement in either the condition of the parks or the personnel who ran them. Decentralization was begun in the late 1980s under the administration of Mayor Harold Washington. Areas, known as clusters, were reconfigured to more equally divide the city along natural and human-made boundaries and to more equally divide the spans of control. Later, the clusters were renamed "hosts" and decision-making responsibilities were decentralized. However, little was accomplished with little incentive for employees to be accountable to the public (President's Report-Park District Reorganization Phase I, 1986). …