By Jo Schaper
Boat launch fees at George Winter Park in South St. Louis County will now be policed by an “Iron Ranger,” according to Tom Ott, acting director for the St. Louis County Parks and Recreation Department.
“This is something new that we’ve just instituted this late summer,” he said. “We intend for it to [...]

By Jo Schaper
Although major cuts to the St. Louis County Park system were averted in December, the swing of the budget ax still has some sting.
On January 25, County Executive Charlie Dooley announced that 20 full-time and four part-time parks employees were being laid off. According to a reliable source, three recently hired law [...]

The numbers are in.
We ran a 15 day poll on our website, promoting it through Facebook and Twitter, to see what options people might consider to fund the budget shortfall which is impacting St. Louis County parks operation. When the poll started, the parks were in imminent threat of closing January 1.
By the [...]

(The following is not an official editorial view of the River Hills Traveler but that of Jo only.)
By Jo Schaper
This week, according to a short, unattributed story on STL Today, the city of Valley Park has expressed interest in taking over ownership of Simpson Park, which is within the city limits.
Few details have been [...]

Because our focus is usually elsewhere, Traveler isn’t often concerned with the ins and outs of St. Louis County politics. Since the St. Louis County parks issue is at its heart a budget issue, we focused some effort to understand it.
Jo found this explanatory story by Paul Hampel of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch/STL [...]

By Jo Schaper
The St. Louis County Council submitted legislation to approve a compromise budget December 6, which would allow the parks threatened with closure in 2012 to remain open, and reduce the number of employee layoffs from 173 to 40. Other service cutbacks, such as closing a satellite government center, and cutting back [...]

Posted December 21
The St. Louis County Parks closure proposal has moved to a new phase, that of finding funding, and I’ve started a new Traveler Links page. And after the first three weeks, the old one had gotten unwieldy, to say the least. Time to link to the old, and start a new one. [...]

New Links Page: Funding St. Louis County Parks
Archived: St. Louis County Links Page updated to Nov. 22
By Jo Schaper
The people have spoken. The St. Louis County Council is well aware they are tasked with finding funding to keep St. Louis County Parks open and park staff in place. The question now is: how? [...]

By Jo Schaper
If St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley or the County Council had any doubts that residents were unhappy with plans to shutter 23 of 63 parks next year, those doubts were laid to rest when some 500 folks showed up at a protest rally and budget hearing in Clayton last night to demand [...]