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Date: 10/5/2022
WEST SPRINGFIELD – Victoria Connor is leaving the Park and Recreation Department after 12 years as its director, but she isn’t going too far away.
Connor has a new job that’s close to her old one both in duties and in distance.
After a 28-year career working on West Springfield’s various parks, she was recently named the new managing director of Stanley Park in Westfield. Connor is excited for her new role, where she will work for the nonprofit board that runs the private park on Western Avenue in Westfield.
She will have more resources: West Springfield’s Park and Recreation budget for this year is just shy of $600,000, including operating costs, personnel and seasonal employees needed to maintain every park in town. Compare that to Stanley Park, founded off the fortune made by Stanley Beveridge’s business, Stanley Home Products Inc. In 2020 the park reported it had a $12 million endowment, with operating expenses of $1.4 million, more than double West Springfield’s Park and Rec budget – for one park. Granted, this one park has a koi pond, a frog pond, a registered historic covered bridge, a formal rose garden, a whole fleet of golf carts, zero-turn lawnmowers and security cameras, with a crew of seasonal college students ready to scope out, hunt down and meticulously trim any particularly ambitious blade of grass.
“Sure. Yeah. It’s been a nice business change,” remarked Connor.
Fancy as it may be, it’s still one property, versus the town-wide tapestry of parks, pools, athletic fields, skate parks, bikeways, boat launches and passive recreational spaces that Connor formerly oversaw, all while remaining accountable to taxpayers and elected officials.
“Sometimes government is weird,” said Connor. “I think it’s meant to be somewhat dysfunctional because you don’t want it to move that fast. You know, you want a lot of heads on it. You do want a lot of conflict and you do want a lot of checks and balances in place.”
She said she was proud of what she was able to accomplish in West Springfield.
“We were fortunate to get funding, able to do a lot of park improvements for the community,” said Connor, adding, “I think my proudest and the biggest project that I worked on was rebuilding and rehabbing the UNICO building.”
That building in Mittineague Park, built by a fraternal service organization, was turned over to the town and became “our flagship” during Connor’s tenure, undergoing three renovations involving $2.2 million of work.
“Now, that building is used seven days a week by the Park and Rec Department,” Connor said.
Other new park facilities that Connor recently opened include the Bagg Brook Heritage Trail and pavilion behind the Irish Cultural Center on Morgan Road, and repairs to the Piper Pond spillway that allowed the town to reintroduce outdoor ice skating at the “Old Res” at Amostown and Piper roads.
She has also worked on updating the town’s Open Space and Recreation Plan, which has served as a guide for park renovations and expansions over the years. There’s room for her successor to drive more growth in recreational faciltiies, she said.
“We’ve been so fortunate to have a lot of parks and playgrounds ... [but] the goal is to have in every section of town, to have a park for local kids to play,” she said.
Connor said she was able to work with other town officials to acquire hundreds of acres of property that could be turned into developed parks, or left as open space and passive recreation trails.
Originally appointed as parks director by Edward Gibson in his last term as mayor, Connor has worked for all of West Springfield’s mayors, and what she described as a cast of characters in the second-floor office at Town Hall – not unlike the NBC series “Parks and Recreation,” she said.
“All the characters that you see, in the setup of the town hall, it was all very similar to West Springfield. So I could really relate to the silly anecdotes that they would go on,” said Connor, adding that “bottom line, every day people’s hearts and souls of the workers and the volunteers ... are always in it, doing it for the right reasons.”
At Stanley Park, Connor will replace Robert McKean, who is retiring at the end of this year after 14 years as managing director.