As a kid, Andy Rodriguez spent most every available waking hour at St. Paul’s Linwood Recreation Center, so much so that rec center staff had little choice but to hire him to help out as a teen.
After graduating from Central High School in 2003, he worked his way up the Parks and Recreation ladder, climbing as high as he could go inside the department without further education. A few years in, fellow parks staff took him aside. It was time, they told him, to go to college.
“This department raised me,” said Rodriguez, who went on to graduate from Augsburg University in Minneapolis in 2012 with degrees in sociology and urban studies. “Both personally and professionally, it helped get me to where I wanted to be. It’s literally been embedded in my life.”
And where did Rodriguez want to be? Little did he realize at the time, but the answer was at the top. On May 18, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter appointed Rodriguez to lead the department of some 600 employees, one of the city’s most public-facing agencies. Rodriguez, 37, is thought to be among the youngest Parks and Rec directors in city history, if not the youngest, and likely the first Latino.
Rodriguez, who grew up in the Summit-University and Macalester-Groveland neighborhoods, now takes his three young children to karate at the Martin Luther King Recreation Center on Mackubin Street. Before being appointed director, he had served as the department’s recreation program supervisor from 2013 until 2019, overseeing nine rec centers, and then as rec services manager, overseeing all 26 rec centers.
The mayor’s 2022 budget expanded free youth sports offerings at 16 rec centers in areas of concentrated poverty, such as soccer and flag football for ages 10 and up. Fall registration has opened at StPaul.gov/parks.
The following interview with Rodriguez has been edited for length and clarity:
Around May 2019, you learned that the Grand Old Day celebration on Grand Avenue had been canceled and led an effort to revive it — “Grand Old Day Anyway.” That was the last Grand Old Day before the pandemic put things on hold. Was it mostly a lot of fundraising?
A lot of fundraising, but I’ll be honest, too. I was at a point within Parks. I’ve worked here my entire life. I’ve never seen my skill set applied outside of it. How would my skill set work outside of it? Walking into a room with a bunch of Grand Avenue business owners and trying to get them all on the same page was challenging. But that was a very special event for me. Me growing up always going to that event made it an even better experience for me.
Beginning in 2020, the pandemic shuttered a lot of Parks and Rec activities and forced stringent cuts. Early on, even water fountains were turned off. What’s opened, what’s closed this summer?
We’re all systems go this summer. Everything’s open. Great River Water Park at the Jimmy Lee Rec Center on Lexington Parkway is the exception. I think we closed that one during COVID and have maintained it that way to focus on our outdoor pools.
Isn’t there a national labor shortage, and especially a lifeguard shortage? Parks and Rec usually makes 40 to 55 summer hires for general parks operations such as mowing and trash pick-up. So far, they’ve hired about 14 workers.
The silver lining for lifeguards is St. Paul is in the best position possible. We have other cities calling us for lifeguards knowing how successful we are for recruitment. It’s a testament to the work culture. The young people want to work there. It’s a fun job. On a different front, the parks workers who open picnic shelters for permits, pick up trash, line ball fields — we’re short there. There continues to be vacancy there. We’re just going to continue to find creative ways to do that so programs can run, grass gets cut.
I think it will be a continuous hiring process for us. We always find creative ways to get things done and this isn’t any different.
Do you also have a volunteer shortage? My kid’s T-ball is still looking for volunteers.
Just collectively as a department, we always need volunteers, whether that’s T-ball or maintaining gardens. For an example like T-ball, we work through parents, guardians and then local colleges. The default would be sending in staff. We have a ton of volunteers who help maintain spaces like Mears Park, Rice Park. For volunteers, we’re pretty robust throughout our system when it comes to garden support.
Is the Great River Water Park usually closed for summer? That’s on Lexington Parkway, in a historically Black neighborhood. Have you gotten a lot of pushback on closing that for summer?
Since the pandemic started, we kept that closed. It was an initial budget reduction, looking at the cost-benefit of running that space. During the summer months, we see attendance gravitate toward the outdoor pools. That’s something we’ll look at in the future.
What’s the next big project on the agenda — a new North End community center on Rice Street?
There’s a lot of exciting projects, but that’s a huge one to cite — probably a late 2023 opening. Highland Bridge Gateway Park, the first public park to open at Highland Bridge, is probably going to open in the next couple weeks. The fence will come down, and those amenities will be available. It seems very quick. A bowl-like skate trail is the main feature. I know the skateboard community is super excited about that.
We’re building a river learning center down at Crosby Park. The engagement for that is going on right now. That’s part of the Great River Passage initiative. By September or October, we should have a finalized design and there’s some advocacy that will have to happen for fundraising.
The Arlington Hills Community Center is getting new soccer amenities. Doesn’t it already have soccer amenities?
That’s a huge project we’ve been working with Minnesota United and the Toro Foundation. That will be a brand-new natural grass field with irrigation. MN United and Toro brought volunteers on site to roll out the sod and put finishing touches on the field. It’s an improvement from what was there. The field was left an unfinished product when the building was built — uneven terrain, not the best product in terms of what we expect from our field. It wasn’t the most programmable space. We’re super happy to have those public-private partnerships.
St. Paul has a lot of rec centers, and Parks and Rec relies on partnerships with sports teams, nonprofits and corporations to staff, outfit and program them. Do you foresee that continuing or even expanding?
Programming partnerships are always going to be valuable. We do soccer camps with the Sanneh Foundation throughout the entire city in the summer months. We have Urban Tennis run our tennis program. There was a time in the rec world when everyone looked to us for everything, and that’s not the case. The sports teams in town, specifically, have been great — the Twins, the MN United, the Vikings, those are the three I can cite over the last few years who have been invested for contributing dollars to support programs and infrastructure. The Twins give us $100,000 every year to support the Twins RBI program, which is their baseball branding for youth activities. Some of that goes into infrastructure as well.
I know that St. Paul, like a lot of cities, has a parks maintenance backlog, but we’re consistently celebrated in the Trust for Public Land’s annual ParkScore index as having the first, second or third best parks in the nation, with the caveat being some disparities in parks access based on race and income. Frogtown is a lot less green overall than Highland Park.
Overall, using the general term of infrastructure renewal, that’s at the forefront of our discussions — how to add more green space, more lighting, more play area. We need to do a good job of maintaining what we have, as well, but that requires investment. Parks, it’s the city department that probably has the most building infrastructure. We’re fortunate to have groups like Como Friends and the St. Paul Parks Conservancy to help aid in those tasks and to bring those dollars to the table. Those disparities exist.
Sometimes within the city you can get complacent. Looking at things with a different lens is important to me. When people say athletics, people think of traditional sports. But everyone recreates differently. Even within our rec centers, kids are learning coding. We have ‘Mobile Jazz,’ a program operated out of a few of our rec centers, with a group of artists, musicians, folks that can teach young people the basics of music production. … Others do podcasts. There’s an element of mentoring.
Any other news on Highland Bridge? The University of St. Thomas has floated plans to build new athletic stadiums there, among other possible locations, which could maybe impact the public ball fields. I think the locals are worried about traffic impacts.
That’s a conversation that me starting in this role I will be jumping right into. I don’t think there’s anything solidified as of yet. There’s definitely some exploration happening there.
What else should I be asking you?
Right Track youth internships. Youth employment lives under Parks, and that is a huge initiative. If we can build leaders within our city, and groom them for future positions, and elevate them, that’s what we want. I know we had a record number of applicants the past two years. The more employers we can get to the table, the more we can hire. It’s a good opportunity. There’s huge payoff there.
