Parks, Recreation and Culture
In early 2009, Volusia County Parks, Recreation and Culture began the process of evaluating their park maintenance and operations practices. Although the County found itself in a financial crisis, management made a preemptive decision to focus on addressing short term issues and making decisions for long term sustainability.
The proactive effort focused on, and had the specific objective, of establishing a “business like” approach to planning, budgeting, performing maintenance and managing the County’s park infrastructure.
Through the process, LA Consulting made eighty two (82) findings and sixty four (64) recommendations in four categories. The four categories included:
General – System and Division opportunities.
Planning – Ideas related to work plans, activity accomplishment, work methods, levels of service, performance measures, activity based costing and budgeting.
Organizing - Determination of labor, contract and equipment resources required to perform needed work, meeting quality expectations.
Directing/Improving – Processes to assign, schedule, outline, prioritize and identify work. Efforts to perform, track, compare and improve work operations.
In summary, it is anticipated that implementation efforts will result in producing more work with less labor, equipment and financial resources being needed. With the emphasis on optimizing performance and improving productivity, the generated efficiency savings total is projected to be from $6 to $12 million.