The Stansbury Service Agency board approved spending on equipment and maintenance during its meeting Wednesday evening, the first with new general manager Gary Jensen.
Jensen requested $14,473 for a new Grasshopper lawn mower, to replace one of the aging mowers in the current fleet. The funds would come out of the $35,000 equipment budget for the year, which has about $32,000 remaining.
Jensen said the mower being replaced would be kept to be salvaged for parts for the service agency’s other mowers, which are about 10 years old.
The board also approved spending on fertilizer for 170 acres of the service agency’s property, with a total cost of $17,258. Jensen said the fertilizer would be applied in the spring and monitored to see if an additional application would be needed in the fall.
Trustee Mike Johnson said the board should look for contributions toward the cost of the fertilizer from the youth spring programs which are the primary users of the service agency’s parks.
The service agency board also approved up to $5,000 toward repairs and maintenance at the Stansbury Park Golf Course, which is owned by the service agency but is leased to a private operator. Jensen and trustees Glenn Oscarson and Aaron Spilker recently toured the golf course and noted deficiencies in the condition of the course, as well as the facilities and infrastructure.
“It just needs a lot of attention,” Spilker said. “It really concerns me that one of our greatest assets of this community is looking like it is.”
Jensen, Oscarson and Jeff Green, the director of golf, met on Tuesday and discussed projects to improve the condition of the course. Oscarson suggested improvements like putting new sand in the sand traps and repairing the bathrooms on the course among a list of possible projects.
“That’s a tremendous asset for us and we need to make it as good as we can,” Oscarson said. “…There’s a lot of things we can do. That would be some money very, very well spent on some of these projects that cost $5,000 or $10,000.”
The money to be used toward projects on the golf course would come out of the lease payment the service agency received from the previous year of around $13,000.