An ENFP woman is never refused. Everything she proposes gets granted at once, warmly, and without money, because in a division where programs are expected to pay for themselves a yes costs nothing to give. Twenty-three years of yes is a public service built out of one person’s evenings, and it leaves no record, because a thing that was never budgeted was never costed.
The summer meals program started in a parking lot with Shay Deveron holding a clipboard she was not using.
We were out at Coolidge Park to look at a broken slide and she was looking at the shelter instead, which was empty, at four in the afternoon, in the middle of a heat advisory.
“How many days a year is that thing rented?”
I said maybe thirty.
“So it’s a covered pavilion with power and a water fountain that sits empty three hundred and thirty days.” She wrote nothing down. “The bus that does the school lunch route in the summer turns around at the church on Ninth. That’s four blocks. Odessa Threadgill told me last week that her grandson eats at the church because it’s the only thing walking distance, and there’s about nine kids in that block.”
I said the schools ran that program and it wasn’t ours.
“It’s ours if the bus stops here instead of turning around,” she said. “It’s the same bus.”
That was 2011. She went and talked to the district’s food service director herself, and to the bus contractor, and to the church on Ninth so nobody would think we were taking anything from them, and the first summer it ran on a folding table she brought from home.
The summer meals site at Coolidge Park served nine thousand and some meals last year and has been written up twice by the state association, and if you ask anybody in this building who started it they will tell you it was a partnership with the school district.
Shay came to Brayton Parks and Recreation in 2003 as a recreation coordinator. She was twenty-seven, with a recreation degree and three years at a camp behind her. She is a fast, warm, physically restless woman who has never sat through a full staff meeting without getting up to get something for somebody. She learns names the first time and uses them for twenty years. She has a particular laugh that arrives just before she asks you for something, and everybody in this department can imitate it, including her.
Brayton is fifty-one thousand people. Parks and Recreation is two halves that share a building and nothing else. Maintenance has nineteen full-time people, a fleet, a levy, and a five-year capital plan. Recreation has six full-time people and a fee schedule, and every program we run is expected to recover its own cost, and that arrangement is written into the city’s financial policies and was last reviewed in 1998.
I came here in 1988 pushing a mower. I have been the recreation superintendent since 2005. Twenty-one years of being Shay’s supervisor.
Here is the sentence this department has used about Shay Deveron for two decades. Everybody says it with real affection. I put it to the director in the room where putting it settled something, and I have repeated it in a council chamber.
Just let her run with it.
The staffing request for next year is due to Finance on the twelfth. It is open on my computer and I have written the same first line five times, and the reason I cannot get past it is that the honest justification is an account of what I have been doing since 2011.
Fenwick Orr has run the department since 2009 and has one thing he says whenever recreation asks for anything.
“Is there a revenue side to this?”
The Brochure
Everything the recreation half of this department does exists as a half-page in a brochure that comes out three times a year.
Program title, description of eleven lines, ages, dates, times, location, resident fee, non-resident fee, and a minimum enrollment. If a program does not hit its minimum ten days out, it is cancelled, and the people who registered get refunded, and the half-page becomes nothing.
That is the whole economy. There is no budget line called programs. There is a personnel line and a supplies line and a contractual line, and everything else is supposed to come out of what people pay to attend.
Which means that in this department, yes is free.
I can approve any idea anybody brings me and it costs the city nothing, because approving it does not create a dollar. It creates a half-page in a brochure and a person who now has to make that half-page work. Maintenance cannot do that. If Dallas Kuhr wants to add a mowing route he has to find equipment hours and a body, and the conversation goes to Fenwick and then to the council. If I want to add a program I say sure.
It took me a very long time to understand that a yes costing nothing to give is a transfer rather than a generosity, and that the thing transferred is somebody’s evenings.
The pool was built in 1964 and the boiler was replaced in 1998 and everything else in that building is original. Opening day is the same every year: Dallas’s crew has been in there for three weeks, the water is still too cold, four hundred people come anyway, and at some point in the afternoon a child throws up in the shallow end and everybody clears out and comes back in an hour, and if that does not happen somebody remarks on it.
I play trombone in the city band. We do six concerts a summer in the band shell at Wallace Park, which my own department maintains, and I have never managed to enjoy one of them, because I spend the whole hour looking at the turf.
Adjacency
What Shay does is not creativity and it is not energy, which are the two words this department has used for twenty-three years and which are both a way of arranging not to see it.
What she does is notice that things are next to each other.
An empty shelter, a bus that turns around four blocks away, a woman at a fitness class who mentioned her grandson, a heat advisory. Four facts that are in the same place at the same time, that nobody else in that parking lot had put together, and out of them a program that feeds nine thousand children a summer.
She is not planning. Planning is what you do afterward, badly, on a laptop at ten at night. What happens in the parking lot is that the possible arrives, unbidden, out of the adjacency of things that were already there.
I stood at the pool for a bilingual lesson block in 2018 because a council member wanted to see it.
There were nineteen kids and two instructors and about thirty adults on the deck in street clothes, which is not how a swim lesson looks.
I asked her why the parents were all still there.
“Because if they leave, they can’t come back in without paying.”
I said we could have waived that.
“I know. I didn’t ask, because if I ask it becomes a policy conversation and then somebody says no for a good reason.” She was watching the shallow end. “So they stay.”
Rusk Alberding, the council member, told me on the way out that it was the best thing he had seen the city do in a decade, and asked what it cost.
I said it was in the brochure.
And the second half is what picks. Because she has nine of those a month and she does not chase nine of those a month.
What she chases is always the same shape. The teenagers who cannot get to the pool. The men at the day labor corner who have nowhere to be at two in the afternoon. The women who will not come to an exercise class where they would be the only one. Something in her selects, immediately and without argument, for whoever is being left out of the thing as it currently exists.
Which is a magnificent instrument for a public recreation department and a catastrophic one inside a fee-recovery model, because the people it selects for are, by construction, the people who cannot pay a resident fee, so her programs do not make their minimums, and a program that does not make its minimum is a failure on the only report that goes to Fenwick.
Reece Dunlavy proposed a disc golf course in 2016. It went into the capital plan, got a line item, got built with a grant Reece did not write, and Reece is the assistant director now. It is a good course and it cost a hundred and ninety thousand dollars and it recovers nothing, because it has no fee, because capital things do not have to.
What the same output costs a man doing this work — and what he gets refused instead of granted — runs on the facing page.
Six full-time recreation staff. I have hired five of them.
Dallas Kuhr asked me at a budget meeting a few years ago, not unkindly, why recreation never asks for anything.
I said we ask for plenty.
“You ask for approvals,” he said. “You don’t ask for money.”
He has nineteen people and a fleet and I have six people and a fee schedule, and he was not being smug about it. He was handing me a fact about my own division and I did not take it.
Run With It
I have never once told Shay Deveron no.
I want that stated as plainly as I can manage, because I spent twenty years experiencing it as the best thing about how I ran this division, and it appears in two of my own performance evaluations as a strength.
Summer meals at Coolidge, 2011. The teen open gym on winter weekends, 2012, which is now three sites. The adaptive fishing derby, 2013. Meals-and-movement for older adults at the two housing authority buildings, 2014. The bilingual swim lesson block, 2015, which is the only reason our lifeguard staff is not entirely white. The mobile rec trailer, 2017, which she got out of a foundation because she wrote the application herself over a holiday weekend. The warming site partnership with the library, 2019. The bus pass pilot, 2021. The Coolidge community garden, 2022.
Nine programs that I can list. There are others that ran for a season or two and stopped and that nobody wrote down, and I would put the real number nearer fifteen.
Not one of them has a budget line. Every one of them was approved by me in under a minute, in a hallway or a parking lot or a doorway, with some version of that sounds great, run with it.
Every one of them is still running.
What I did not see until the spring is this: every one of them is still running because she runs it. The trailer is scheduled off her phone. The swim block is staffed because she calls three people. The warming site works because she and one librarian have an arrangement that has never been written down by anybody.
Half a Person
In 2014, when the older-adult program went into the second housing authority building, she asked me for something.
In twenty-three years it is the only time she has asked me for a resource. I have checked. I keep my calendars.
She wanted half a position. Not a person — half. Twenty hours a week of somebody who could drive the van and set up and take down, which is most of an afternoon of physical work she was doing herself at both sites on top of everything else.
I did not have half a position. All of that is true. It is the whole of my defence and it is not sufficient.
What I said was that the request would have to go to Fenwick with a revenue side, and that the program had no fee because the population had no money, and that we could look at it in the next budget cycle.
And then I said the other thing.
“Honestly, you’d do it better yourself. You know all of them by name. Anybody I gave you, you’d end up training and it’d be more work.”
She laughed and said that was probably true and went and got the van keys.
Every word of that was accurate. She would have done it better herself, she did know all of them by name, and half a temporary body would in fact have been more work for the first two months. And it was a way of turning a resource request into a compliment, in a hallway, inside about ten seconds. I watched it work. I have used a version of it on other people since.
We never revisited it in the next budget cycle. I did not put it in.
She asked me about it once, the following spring, in the shape of a joke.
“Did my half a person die of natural causes?”
I said the cycle had been tight.
“It’s fine,” she said. “I’ve got Odessa’s nephew twice a week” — she had recruited a volunteer — “and he’s better than half a person anyway.”
That is the last time the subject came up between us in twelve years.
Nine Weeks
She had a shoulder rebuilt in the spring and was out nine weeks.
The reason she had a shoulder rebuilt is that she has been setting up and taking down folding tables and a canopy and a portable sound system, by herself, since 2011, and her orthopedist said something to her about it that she repeated to me as a joke.
The nine weeks were a catastrophe, and the shape of it matters, because it was not dramatic. Nothing collapsed. What happened is that everything got slightly worse and a few things quietly stopped.
The mobile trailer went out three times instead of eleven. The warming site partnership had a gap of two weeks that the library covered without telling us, which I found out about afterward from the library. The bilingual swim block ran with one instructor instead of two and the waitlist did not get called. Odessa Threadgill called the front desk twice about the garden plots and got a voicemail both times.
I called her back myself in the eighth week, which I am not proud of, since it took eight weeks.
She was perfectly pleasant. She asked when Shay was coming back and I said a couple of weeks.
“Well, the plots’ll keep,” she said. Then she said, “Tell her Trey made honor roll.”
I wrote it on a sticky note and I did tell her, and Shay said she knew, and that Odessa had texted her from the parking lot at the school.
Kaveh Sarraf covered what he could. He is good and he was already at capacity, and he is twenty-six, and at the finish of it he asked whether summers were always like that, and I said no, and that was a lie of a specific kind — it is always like that, and he had simply been standing next to somebody who absorbed it.
Fenwick came down to my office in the seventh week, which he does not do.
“Is the trailer out this week?”
I said it was not.
“Why not.”
I said Kaveh had the day camp and the trailer needs two people to set up.
Fenwick stood there a moment. “Who normally does that?”
When she was back, he asked me in a hallway, in a perfectly normal voice, what it would take to make sure that did not happen again.
And I said I’d put something together.
The Request
To put something together I had to write down what she does.
There is no document. In twenty-three years nobody has ever itemized it, because none of it was ever budgeted, and a thing that was never budgeted was never costed. Her position description is two pages and it was last updated in 2010 and it says plans, organizes and implements recreation programs for assigned age groups.
So I sat down with the brochures and my calendars and I built it.
Nine programs. For each one: contact hours, setup and teardown, partner coordination, volunteer recruitment and scheduling, purchasing, the grant reporting on the two that have grants, the phone calls. I was conservative. Where I was not sure I used the low number.
It comes to one point eight full-time equivalents on top of a full-time job.
I ran it three times because the number did not look right, and on the third pass I added the things I had left out, which were the two hours a week she spends on the phone with people who call her directly because they have her cell number, and the fact that she has answered that phone on a vacation every year I have been her supervisor.
One point eight.
That is the number that would have to have been in a budget every year since about 2014 for this department to have been doing honestly what it has in fact been doing.
She has been doing that since 2011 and I approved every piece of it in a hallway.
Reece Dunlavy’s disc golf course required a hundred and ninety thousand dollars, a survey, an environmental checklist, three council readings and a ribbon. Nobody at any point asked whether there was a revenue side to it, because capital does not have to answer that question, and the reason capital does not have to answer that question is that somebody, at some point, wrote a policy.
The request I have to submit asks for one full-time recreation coordinator at a starting salary of fifty-four thousand dollars, and there is a justification box on the form, and everything I have just written is what goes in that box, and the honest version of it is a description of my own conduct over fifteen years, submitted to a finance director, in support of a position that Fenwick is going to ask me whether there is a revenue side to.
Appendix D
The city did a parks and recreation master plan in 2019. Every department in this country does one every decade and ours cost ninety-four thousand dollars.
It is a real document and parts of it are useful and the council adopted it six to one.
The consultant’s process included a staff engagement component, which was two half-days at the senior center, and one of the sessions used an instrument. Sixteen boxes, four letters, a facilitated discussion about how the team communicates.
The results are in Appendix D of the adopted master plan, by name, with the letters printed next to each of us. It is a public document. It went to the council in a packet, it was adopted by resolution, and it is on the city’s website under a heading called Plans and Studies. It has been on the city’s website for seven years and it will be there for as long as Brayton has a website, and I would put money on the proposition that no member of the public has ever opened Appendix D.
Shay’s line says ENFP.
The paragraph beside it is about enthusiasm and connecting with people and generating ideas, and it reads like a horoscope, which is what lets everybody stop there. The material is in the appendix to the appendix, where the consultant’s subcontractor explains that the letters stand for a ranking: one habit under the load, a second that sorts whatever the first one throws off, and, at the bottom, two she can only reach by turning around and reaching for them, which is slow and which does not go well with a deadline on it. Where each of these falls in her case is set out on the page this type is given, taken from the sixteen that instrument was cut from.
The one carrying most of it is the arrival of the possible. Not searching and not straining — the adjacency of things that are already in front of her assembling itself into something that could exist. A shelter, a bus, a grandmother, a heat advisory.
The second one is the selector, and hers picks for whoever is currently outside the thing. That is not a policy she holds and she could not defend it in a budget hearing, and it is the most valuable instrument this city has, and it is precisely calibrated to produce programs that cannot recover their cost.
The final pair are what she needed and did not have.
One is running the apparatus in the external sense — the request, the position description, the workload document, the escalation, the sentence in a meeting that says this is now a job and somebody has to be paid for it.
The other is a usable account of what a thing has actually cost. She cannot cost her own work. I have watched her estimate it a dozen times and she guesses low every single time, in her own disfavor, by a factor I would now put at about two. I showed her the one point eight in my office, door open.
She read it twice and then said, “That seems high.”
I said I had used the low number everywhere I wasn’t sure.
“The setup’s not two hours,” she said. “It’s like forty minutes.”
I said I had timed it in the spring, from the truck to the first person through the door, and it was an hour and fifty.
She said, “Well, I’m not counting the driving.”
So the arrangement was stable for fifteen years, and it was stable because neither of us was going to produce the number. She could not, and I did not have to, and a division that permits everything and funds nothing will run on one person’s evenings for exactly as long as that person’s shoulder holds out.
The plain part, and it belongs to me because I said yes to all of it. Run with it is an assignment. Assignments belong in a position description and in a workload document, and asking for a program to be added to your PD in writing, with an hours estimate attached, is an ordinary request that a supervisor who declines has told you something by declining. In public employment there is usually a defined classification review process with a form and a timeline, and asking for one is a procedure and not an accusation. None of that is a conversation about somebody’s temperament, and the people for it are a union representative where there is one, an employment lawyer where there is none, and whoever the jurisdiction keeps for complaints.
The consultant’s methodology page describes the instrument as a facilitation aid, says in terms that it has no place in assignment or selection, and adds that a person filling it in again four weeks later lands somewhere else roughly one time in three, though the continuous scales behind it hardly shift.
The master plan’s recommendation for recreation programming, in the body of the same document, is to leverage existing staff capacity and community partnerships.
I was on the steering committee. I read that sentence in draft and thought it sounded about right.
Kaveh
He came to my door last week with an idea about the two vacant lots behind the transit center. The city owns one and the transit authority owns the other and neither of them mows.
It is a good idea. It is the kind of idea Shay would have had, and I think he got it from being around her, and he was standing in my doorway with the shape of it and not the details, the way people do.
Two things unstuck themselves while I was building that spreadsheet.
The parking lot at Coolidge in 2011, first. That one has been told in this building for fifteen years and twice at the state conference — the day Shay saw a shelter and invented a meals program — and the laugh is always the clipboard she wasn’t writing on. What was in front of her in that lot was a set of unrelated facts belonging to three separate organizations, and she put them together in under a minute, and then she carried the result on her own back for a decade and a half, and the reason the department can say it was a partnership with the school district is that a partnership is what you call a thing when nobody paid for it.
Then the hallway in 2014, and you’d do it better yourself. In my telling it has always been a compliment I paid a colleague. It was a refusal wearing a compliment, delivered by a man who did not have the thing she was asking for and who could have written it down and sent it up anyway, and did not, and then said something that made the asking feel unnecessary. She never asked again. Twelve years.
What Appendix D had no space for. She is careless with money and has covered supplies for programs out of her own pocket in amounts I have chosen not to establish; she has a brother in a facility in another county and takes two days a month that she books as vacation; and she is capable, about one former director of this department, of a flat and total coldness that nobody who has met her would predict.
I told Kaveh it was a good idea.
He said Shay had told him to bring it to me, and that she’d said she’d help him run it.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.