Heaping scorn on the mayor’s plan to consolidate city recreation centers, City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young blasted Recreation and Parks Department officials yesterday, flatly rejecting their contention that a tight budget means some recs must be closed.

“Go to Finance, like [Police] Commissioner Bealefeld did, and say ‘You’re not going to give me cuts!’ In the end they not only didn’t cut him, they gave him increases,” Young said. “You all have got to go and fight for it.”

“How can you all live with this?” he said, at another point, facing 16 top Recreation and Parks officials and staffers, who had come to City Hall for their department’s annual budget review. “We’re talking about small kids having to walk a half a mile.”

While Young (along with Councilman Nick Mosby and some others) was hammering away on Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s rec center plan, some other council members remained silent, sauntered to the back of the room to chat or went to sit in the outer lounge area.

Councilman William H. Cole IV (who might have been expected to, since he’s chairman of the council’s Recreation and Parks Committee) was one of several members who did not attend the meeting.

Asked after the meeting if the council would do more than vent about the rec closures, Young said he could defy the mayor only if his fellow members joined him.

“If it is the will of the council, if I have their full support, then we could do it,” he said. “But you saw how they all scattered out and got in their little groups.”

Creating a “Recreation Desert?”

Yesterday’s meeting on the department’s 2013 budget – attended by few members of the public and no other media – was the latest skirmish in the increasingly bitter war over the administration’s privatization plan.

Rawlings-Blake proposes spending $19 million to build and renovate four centers over the next few years that would become state-of-the-art facilities.

But as part of her plan, four rec centers – all in West Baltimore – would permanently close and an additional 10 would close if qualified operators are not found.

That didn’t set well with Mosby, who represents West Baltimore and said recs are especially needed there to combat youth crime by giving kids a place to go.

“We have a huge demographic of young children. We have abandoned buildings. We have drug usage. We have violent crime.”

Mosby said he mapped out the recreational facilities remaining under Rawlings-Blake’s plan, noted the centers being closed and discounted the centers being given over to private operators, which he clearly regarded as iffy.

“You’re left with a huge gap, a huge hole,” he said. “In West Baltimore, we have a recreational desert.”

Other councilmembers were less critical of the mayor’s plan and one, in fact, praised it as “a model.” That comment came from Councilwoman Sharon Green Middleton.

Her district is the location of the Towanda Rec Center, where Park Heights Renaissance, a quasi-public group, was awarded $100,000 this week by the Board of Estimates to take it over.

“I’d ask you to share your enthusiasm with the Councilman from the 7th District,” Vondrasek said, prompting a sharp rebuke from Young who noted that Mosby was not in the room to defend himself.

“We Have to Talk Dollars and Cents”

Amid this barrage of criticism, interim director Bill Vondrasek got an opportunity to defend the whole concept when Young asked, “Tell me, why are we closing rec centers?”

“So we can increase our resources and focus them in fewer locations and offer better resources in these locations,” Vondrasek said.

“So it’s not a matter of inadequate facilities?” Young shot back.

“Yes,” Vondrasek said. “The physical state of the centers is also one of the criteria used in determining [which centers would be closed].” There was also the general problem of inadequate staffing (“In a lot of these centers, we basically have somebody to open the door and that’s it.”)

Mosby pressed the officials on how sites were chosen for the closure list and seized on one of the criteria: usage. Upon hearing from Rec Bureau Chief Bill Tyler that sign-up sheets and “visual counts” were used, Mosby said “How can we use that as a source of information? It’s a real skewed way to determine something so important to our community.”

The main criteria, Tyler said, was how easy it would be for the building to be “built-out” according to the mayor’s consolidation plan.

But he also said the mayor’s plan was driven by a tight budget.

“We cannot have this discussion unless we talk about dollars and cents.” The cost to run a recreation center in Baltimore is “bargain basement, $300,000 annually,” he said. (In a forum sponsored by the Citizens Planning and Housing Association, Tyler said $181,790 was the average price for operating a rec center in 2008.)

Pressed by Mosby and Young to re-think the alignment of centers being beefed up or shut down, Vondrasek said taking some centers off the closure list “means some other center goes on the list. Somebody’s going to be unhappy.”

“One thing we are not going to do is have you pit one neighborhood against the other,” Young replied icily.

$155,000 Director of Communications?

If some members were inclined to be skeptical about the department’s claim of tight finances, they found fodder in the budget book before them. Young raised the issue of three new positions requested that would cost roughly $300,000.

“$155,000 for a new director of communications? I think the money could be used another way,” said Councilwoman Helen Holton, sitting as the chair of the Budget and Appropriations Committee. She elicited from Vondrasek an acknowledgment that the amount was “too much.”

Vondrasek also found himself defending the creation of a position for “director of partnerships.”

“You’ve got all these partnership prospects – UnderArmour, corporations, the Boy Scouts,” he said. “They’re approaching us all the time. It would be nice to be able to give them the attention they deserve.”