Massachusetts Governor Unveils Plan to Make Beaches, Parks Cleaner
On Aug. 1, Gov. Deval Patrick today announced steps toward improving maintenance at state beaches in the metropolitan Boston area as well as a top-to-bottom review of Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) as part of a plan to refocus the department on its core mission of parks, forests, and beaches.
Meeting with members of the Metropolitan Beaches Commission, Patrick announced that DCR will hire several year-round beach managers, each with a maintenance and ranger staff, who will be responsible for the 19 Boston-area coastal beaches, augmenting DCR?s regular maintenance efforts.
The new beach managers come on top of new DCR efforts to ramp up park and beach maintenance this spring and summer. To better respond to the recreational demand in the Greater Boston area, about 60 seasonal staff members were hired several weeks earlier than in past years, and an ambitious maintenance schedule for the spring was followed on July 1 by an even more aggressive upkeep plan for summer. For the first time, maintenance schedules for each park and beach in Greater Boston have been posted on the DCR Web site, http://www.mass.gov/dcr.
This article originally appeared in the 08/01/2007 issue of Environmental Protection.