New brochure adds to Cheney parks and recreation overhaul

By BECKY THOMAS

Staff Reporter

When city budget cuts closed a door on the Cheney parks and recreation department, its staff decided to open some windows.

Despite a 5 percent cut to the parks and rec budget, the department is determined to improve and expand its services to the community, said parks and recreation director Paul Simmons.

“We're always looking for ways to improve and that's always been a past practice but this has been probably the biggest overhaul that we've done, since I've been here, as far as just changing how we operate and being more effective,” he said.

A big part of the overhaul was a complete redesign of the parks and recreation brochure.

The current brochure is pretty straightforward, with different sections, brief descriptions of class offerings and activities. When they decided to cut the brochures from three per year to two, more changes began to surface.

“We were thinking about it and our brochure is really good at capturing the stuff that we're doing but it really doesn't give a good picture of Cheney,” Simmons said.

So they approached different organizations in the community about putting together a page about what they do, complete with photos and a revamped page design.

The new brochure, which will be published in January, will include pages featuring the Cheney Library, Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge, Ice Age Floods Institute and more.

Recreation supervisor Kim Best helped design the pages, and she also worked to redesign the regular brochure pages to make them stand out.

“Each page stands out itself,” she said. “It will look kind of like a magazine where you flip through and see a lot of different colors, different layouts, different texts, just different ways of presenting the information.”

Best and Simmons said they hoped that opening up the brochure to community organizations would help in their efforts to form partnerships outside of the department. They hope 2011 will bring more recreation opportunities for Cheney, possibly including an Ice Age Floods tour, indoor swimming lessons taught by Eastern Washington Univerity's pool staff and more. EWU graduate student Chris Hoppe will conduct a study of possible outdoor recreation activities the department could offer.

“It all has to do with having a greater impact on the community,” Simmons said.

The new parks and recreation brochure, which will cover January through August before switching to a fall-winter and spring-summer schedule, will be sent out to more than 9,000 addresses in January and will be available on the city's website at http://www.cityofcheney.org/recreation.

Becky Thomas can be reached at [email protected].