ABOVE: Ruben Olivarez from Total Lawn Care plants native grasses and flowers around the newly added retention pond at the new north parking lot at Gomsrud Park in Fairmont on Monday. After this is completed and some new park equipment is installed by the city, Public Works Director Nick Lardy said they will be finished with projects, and will be able to put further focus on maintaining the park grounds and buildings.

FAIRMONT – With events, maintenance of about two dozen parks and multiple other projects, the Fairmont Parks Department has had to be on its front foot in July, National Park and Recreation Month.

Regular maintenance includes mowing the grounds and painting and staining buildings, which Public Works Superintendent Nick Lardy said is present every year.

“There’s always something that needs to be stained or painted,” he said. “As far as roofing and all that goes, we’re sitting pretty well there. We have a list of outstanding items that we need to work on, and we whittle away at them and get them done as we can.”

The biggest one is mowing. Like last year, Lardy said the grasses are growing at a fast rate due to timely rains and hot weather.

“We got nine park employees, and we have four to five guys on a mower all day long, every day of the week,” he said. “That doesn’t leave much of the crew left over to get things done, but we’ll pull guys off the mowers if need be to get something repaired or fixed up.”

One place this has been felt is West Belle Vue Park. The equipment has been purchased and delivered, ready to go. Lardy said now it is just a matter of finding a time to get it installed, after which he said they would pretty much be done with projects.

In the middle of the new parking lot at Gomsrud Park, as well as in the retention ponds on the east and west sides of the park, native grasses and flowers are being planted with contracted work from Total Lawn Care.

“They’re putting some native plants and grasses in the stormwater retention ponds to filter out the sediment before it gets dumped into the lake,” Lardy said. “That’s all the water coming off the parking lot.”

The retention pond had to be added due to environmental regulations that the city needs to comply with.

That work is almost completed, according to Lardy, with the prep work completed and plantings well underway.

On top of all of this, Lardy said the last month has featured additional commitments surrounding Interlaken Heritage Days, the Fairmont Triathlon, Vault the Plaza and the Fourth of July.

“If we have an upcoming event, we usually start working on it Monday before the weekend of the event. We get the mowers in there; we have eight seasonal workers that do a lot of the trim work and beach clean-up and stuff. Get everybody in there and get everything snazzed up before the weekend.”

Where they have been able to benefit is all eight of those workers were here last year, which Lardy said has never happened before in his tenure, and has proven useful.

“It works out real well,” he said. “It really cuts down the training time to show somebody what they need to do and how we do it.”

On the whole, Lardy said the parks have been doing very well, and the completed work on Sylvania Park has received positive reception as well.

One issue they have seen some instances of, as they have in previous years, is vandalism.

“We’ve had issues with it every year,” he said. “It all depends; it comes and goes, but we just fix what we need to and keep everything open and going.”

Looking forward, Lardy said getting the playground equipment at the Belle Vue park is his main focus, and ideally rains will slow down in July and August as they have in the past so the department can continue hitting necessary general maintenance items.