Denver Parks & Rec Director Grilled by City Council Over Facility Contracts

Denver City Council members sounded choked up and angry as they put Parks & Recreation Director Jolon Clark on the hot seat during a committee meeting on Tuesday, March 3.

Clark, a former councilmember from 2015 to 2023, was appointed as Parks & Rec director by Mayor Mike Johnston in October 2023. Under his administration, Denver nonprofits have lost their homes in city-owned facilities where they’ve anchored community services and established themselves as reliable partners for decades, including the Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado at the Dos Chappell Bathhouse in Washington Park and the Birdseed Collective at the Globeville Rec Center.

Parks & Rec also removed the Denver Squid, a long-running LGBTQ+ group, from the Rude Recreation Center as it sought to eliminate private swim teams at city pools, and left a former Wash Park vendor holding nearly four dozen swan boats after the city decided to take over boat rentals at the park’s pond. In all of these instances, the organizations that lost their contracts said Parks & Rec gave little or no notice.

Clark had to answer for those controversial contracting decisions in front of members of the council’s Parks, Arts and Culture Committee on Tuesday, and some of his interrogators didn’t seem to enjoy the process. Councilmember Darell Watson, whose District 9, was so emotional that he couldn’t ask his questions at first.

Councilwoman Stacie Gilmore, whose husband Scott Gilmore was laid off from Parks & Rec last September, accused Clark of “colonizing land throughout this city by giving it away and not keeping it for the people,” and asked him if he was trying to commodify Denver’s park facilities.

“It seems like, based on the Birdseed Collective, the LGBTQ swim group, Wash Park, now with Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado being asked to leave the boathouse when they spent millions of dollars in doing work there — are you moving the direction of Denver Parks & Rec to commodify parks in the city?”

Clark denied that he was, but also said that Parks & Rec wants the city to take over money-making operations at the facilities it owns, which led Gilmore to hound him more for clarification.

“Our mission is not to generate revenue for for-profit companies [or] to go outside of the city when we have the capacity to do that within the city,” Clark responded. “We aren’t allowed by charter to just rent out space in any city building to any nonprofit in need. We first have to exhaust internal uses. …Is there something that we can put in there that directly enhances park experiences?”

Gilmore asked Clark if he sees himself as responsible for the contracting decision that Parks & Rec makes, asking the director if it’s accurate to say, “You have pretty much the full scope of making decisions about concessionaires, vendors, lease holders.”

But as Clark sees it, he’s “not on that ground-level decision making, but ultimately, they do land on my desk,” he said.

“You are,” Gilmore responded. “Ultimately, you are.”

Birdseed at Globeville Rec Center

The Birdseed Collective, a community-serving nonprofit in Globeville-Elyria Swansea, had to abruptly leave the Globeville Recreation Center in November. The organization had been operating out of the Globevill Rec Center since 2018, handing out food, running after-school programs and letting Aztec dancers practice there. The Birdseed Collective lost the lease to the Denver Dream Center, the local chapter of a Los Angeles-based Christian nonprofit.

On Tuesday, Councilman Watson called Birdseed Collective’s removal a “terrible decision,” adding that “there is no way we can move Birdseed out” before it had more time to look for other leases last year.

“The Globeville Rec Center as run by the Birdseed Collective is part of the community,” Watson said. “I intend to continue to make it my intention for the Birdseed Collective make it back into the Globeville Rec Center.”

Council President Amanda Sandoval said she was a District 9 council aide when the Birdseed Collective moved into the Globeville Recreation Center in 2018 (it started offering programming there in 2010). The Birdseed Collective was able to quickly put together a food bank for English- and Spanish-speaking residents, but the Denver Dream Center isn’t as “culturally nimble,” Sandoval argued.

At-large Councilmember Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez said her office was also contacted by residents in the area who wanted to have input before the Birdseed Collective was kicked out.

“There was an impression made to the community members that there was going to be an outreach process,” she said. “They were very concerned with that.”

Clark admitted that “we wouldn’t have so many questions and media coverage and be here if we had been better at communication,” but insisted that virtually all contracts are temporary.

“A lot of those communication things are outlined in the contract. When you sign a contract with the city, it says, ‘Hey, it will end on this date, and outside of having a new agreement in place, that’s the date you need to move out,” he said. “Obviously, what’s written in there is not meeting the needs of these organizations…we do have something to look at about how are we communicating, when are we communicating, what is the right amount of time, and we’ve probably missed the mark there.”

The Birdseed Collective has since moved into the former Tepeyac Community Health Center clinic in Globeville.

“We’ve expanded our outdoor recreation program and our outdoor recreation staff. We now have the expertise and the capacity to handle boat rentals,” he said. “We also feel like we can expand community benefit.”

Stephanie Figueroa, a spokesperson for Parks & Rec, echoed that answer in a March 3 email to Westword about VOC’s removal. According to Figueroa, VOC was found to be in the way of fully using the facility for a “park purpose” during reevaluation, so the department decided to let the contract expire.

VOC’s first executive director, Dos Chappell, built the trail around Wash Park’s Smith Lake and preserved the 114-year-old bathhouse. After nearly thirty years there, VOC has to leave the bathhouse by 2027.

“A lot has changed in Washington Park over the last few decades since this lease began, and we believe that, moving forward, this building can directly serve the park, park experience and park user,” Figueroa says. “DPR is currently working with VOC on a short-term extension of their current lease until the end of 2027. No decisions about any specific future use have been made at this time.”

Gilmore told Clark that she and her constituents want Parks & Rec “to have nothing to do” with upcoming projects like the American Indian Center, warning him that “the decisions that you’re making and have made are going to continue to ripple out.”

Clark said that Parks & Rec wanted to clear the way for the city to offer more swim lessons by city-paid instructors and that councilmembers and the public asked for it.

“One of the number-one things many of you sent our way is, ‘Hey, swim lessons just went up and were available, and within one minute, they’re all gone,'” Clark said. “There is a limited number of hours in the day to our pools, so the recreation team made a decision to be able to open up more swim lessons.”

Clark said offering swim lessons allowed the city to “recover revenue” while the pool was in use, but “ate into the time we have available to permit out for those private uses of our pool, many of them nonprofits, great organizations,” adding that “we were able to add almost 150 new swim lessons” by kicking those organizations out.

However, Parks & Rec is “back to the drawing board” with new permitting ideas for its pools, Clark said, and will have to bring that idea back to the full council for approval.