Volunteers at Parks Keep the Wolf From the Door

If a penny saved is truly a penny earned, then the volunteers for the San Diego County Parks and Recreation Department definitely have earned their keep.

More than 200 people strong, the volunteer program saved the parks department $1.4 million in the 1984-85 fiscal year.

The brainchild of Robert Copper, the department’s director, the volunteer program was born in the budget-cutting days after the passage of Proposition 13.

Ralph Strahm, the program’s coordinator, said, “We lost 50% of our paid staff in 1978.”

The program started in 1981 with 48 volunteers and has grown to more than three times that size. Today, all 94 county parks have volunteers.

The National Assn. of Counties will honor the parks department for its volunteer program next month in Las Vegas.

The varied tasks of a volunteer include maintaining the grounds to collecting fees to cleaning restrooms. As compensation for working 20 hours a week, volunteers are provided with campsites in the parks where they work, sewage hook-ups and electricity.

Isolation, hard work and winter would deter most people from volunteering. But for some, the isolation is the attraction to becoming a volunteer.

“I love being close to nature,” said Jean Klingsmith, who has been a volunteer at Lower Otay Lakes Park for four years.

Klingsmith, who drives 52 miles round-trip a day to take her children to school, feels that living in the park offers a better environment for her children than city living.

“I like my kids to live out here because they are not exposed to the drugs and other things everyday,” she said.

Klingsmith’s 18-year-old daughter, Amy, is also a volunteer.

“I have been a volunteer since I was 14,” Amy said. “I don’t mind being so far away from my friends. Most of them think that I am kind of neat since I have worked for so long.”

For Jerry and Donna Manning, volunteers at Vista Park, volunteering is an opportunity to improve the community.

“Being involved in something is important to my wife and me,” Jerry Manning said. “I’ll probably be a volunteer as long as the volunteer program exists.”

Without the program, the parks would operate at a severe disadvantage, Copper said.

“We don’t want to contemplate what the loss of our volunteer program would mean,” he said. “We certainly would have difficulty keeping everything open.”