Bangor Parks Committee Hears Ice Arena, Athletic Field Update

[1:17] Ryan R. Robbins: This is a regularly scheduled meeting of the Vanduul Park Recreation and Poverty Advisory Committee. My name is Ryan Robin. I'm the chair and a committee member, and we'd like to introduce ourselves going right to left. [1:32] Joe Nelson: Joe Nelson, Cameron Stadium Athletic Field Supervisor and Sawyer Ice Arena General Manager. [1:41] Ryan R. Robbins: Brianna Frye, community member. Suzette Furrow, community member. Debbie Jombrough, assistant director. Ben Collette, community member. Michaela Coffey, community member. Okay, first item is approving the September minutes, so if everyone could undermanifest the stadium. Yeah. Dawn is misspelled. It should be S-H-A-W-N. I don't even know. That's awesome. Anything else? Thank you, Ryan. I've got a chance to read it. Is there anything specific? [3:53] Joe Nelson: Thanks for having me here today. So my name is Joe Nelson, and I've actually been in this position since sometime in the early 90s, one of my first Parks and Rec job, high school senior year in 1989, 89 parks maintenance so I've basically gone away five years of college but I've been with Parks and Rec ever since so that's a little in this whole time is 107 13th Street Sawyer Ice Arena it's basically the same building that I had 30 years ago so it's that time of the year where we're getting ready to open it's seasonal rank Usually operates from mid to late October I always try to open later youth hockey and the organizations always want us to open early. So we actually probably opening a week early in the normal October 19th. So I'll shift gears slightly to just tell you, take care of the athletic facilities and with Cameron Stadium, a turf fields basically being used seven days a week. Now year round, almost basically when there's not snow on it, they try to schedule things. So I just came from an event there now. And the high school, our Parks and Rec employees take care of all the athletic facilities for the Bangor School Department. So basically Cameron Stadium, Garland Street between Fruit Street and Garland Street has middle school sports, high school sports. And then Bangor High School has high school sports. And then Dowdy, James F. Dowdy Middle School has athletic fields out behind them. So we're lining, mowing, treating them kind of year round and then trying to do that all around gym classes, school uses and the athletic field. So we're pretty blessed with the staff. A lot of some full time employees are all technically in the full time now trying to get them to work as much as possible to do that upkeep. The last month or so, we started the process of the ice arena. We have a sand floor there, so it takes us weeks to build up ice. A cement floor like Alfond and across the river's ice rank can do it in a weekend. Basically, we need to smooth out. It has many tubes underneath the sand, so you have to make sure that's smooth, wet it, turn it on, freeze it, then gradually build up ice. And when you're building up the ice, if you lay water, you have to wait for it to freeze. And if we have 70 degree days outside, that sometimes isn't real conducive. So we'll only be able to hit it a couple times a year. We've actually had dedicated staff because of the problems we had last year with the damage to the chiller and the under the gun. Basically brought in a night shift last year that worked so good that we kind of tweaked some of the hours of the guys so we actually stayed later to build up the ice. So we were ready this past Tuesday to paint the ice, which people don't even realize a lot of times with an ice rink you actually have to paint it. So I remember doing it for many years when we'd start at 7 a.m. and we'd finish at like noon the next day, literally working through the night. This year we did an all-time best where seven o'clock and we finished about 5.30 p.m. That night. Now that's finished painting and putting five logos out. One is the 30-foot by 30-foot Twin City, one of the home high schools, the Bangor area team that combined with Brewer and other schools. That's 30-foot by 30-foot out in the center of the ice, and then all our other high schools, our parks and recs. So we finished that. Now we have to build an inch and a half of ice above that. So it's very light coats. Then it's heavier coats. And then hopefully around midweek next week or maybe even the beginning of the week, we'll get the Zamboni out because it's got spiked tires and we don't want to go through to the paint. So we have to build up at least closer to a quarter of an inch. So we'll be doing that right through the weekend. We plan an opening Monday. Monday so soy arena we host three high schools and Main Junior Black Bears is our basic tenants and home people we were there isn't enough ice time in the day to be blunt especially weeknights for the practices and the amount of time my job is trying to tweak everything one of our area high schools to get time has to practice before school so we basically have somebody there before school during the high school season and then they played their home games there Hamden Academy John Baps and then the Twin City Titans now I will tell you I don't think any of those high schools are standalone now there are many less high school teams around the state because people have combined but youth hockey is pretty strong the Main Junior to the Black Bears with the amount of people playing our learn to skate program we run parks