A walk in the park - or the cemetery

Allen Dumond, Parks, Forestry and Cemetery Superintendent, City of Cadillac.

Tell me your official title and how long you have been working at this job?

I am the Parks, Forestry and Cemetery Superintendent for the City of Cadillac. I do a lot of other stuff too. I believe I began with the city in 1989 and have had this position for 12 or 13 years. I wear a lot of hats and it's a great job - talk about diversity!

Describe for me a typical day on the job.

My typical day varies with each season of course. In the summer there's more focus on the parks. So I have nine high school and college students working in the parks. They would be dispersed to open the bathrooms on the lakefront and at Kenwood. They empty trash, and then they mow and trim and paint.

We have several areas we take care of: the lakefront, Kenwood, the skate park, White Pine trail, the Clam River Walk Way, the Sound Garden, and all the municipal parking lots. We mow and trim the ones behind the stores. And when Mitchell Street looks shaggy, I send a crew out to trim that.

Tell me about the forestry part of your job.

In the fall and the spring we have a tree-planting program. In between the streets and the sidewalk the city has the right of way. At the request of residents we plant trees there. We also keep track of all the trees in the city that may be dangerous to the public or diseased. I try to discern if they are dead or dangerous. We would rather trim than remove a tree but sometimes we have to take them down. For 21 years running we have been given a Tree City USA designation, given to us the National Arbor Day Foundation. They have requirements we have to meet to qualify for this. I have to apply for that every November to make sure we get the designation. Last year we took down 67 trees around the city. We planted well over 100.

And how about the cemetery?

I basically oversee a foreman named Brian Elenbaas. He does a great job and I don't have a lot of worries with those fellows up there. Brian takes great pride in the cemetery.

And your winter duties would include what?

The parks don't get as much attention, of course, as the street department in the winter. I assist the street superintendent. On the night when I'm on call I made the determination whether to call the guys in to plow. It depends on the type of snow. If there are a couple of inches, two or three, we will call the guys in. That's tough on them. They get the call at 1 a.m. and have to be in at 2 a.m. They do a great job of snow removal. They go from 2:00 until 10 a.m., making sure the school routes are open. It's not easy tugging a big blade truck. There's five plow routes and these five guys get the whole city cleaned up in an eight-hour period in one night.

Speaking of winter, tell me how the Christmas tree lights came about in the city park.

We used to light a tree down on the corner of Harris and Mitchell Streets. Somebody would donate a tree and we would cut it and bring it up. The idea to light extra trees came up one year when I had a few extra strands of lights. There were some new outlets due to accommodating Gus Macker tournaments. I lit up three trees. Carol Potter, my good friend who has all kinds of ideas, said wouldn't it be great if we could light up the entire lakefront? Every time she said, 'wouldn't it be great' I knew it meant a lot of work. But the next year we did ten trees. The following year we lit 25 trees. Then it started getting expensive. Carol came up with the adopt-a-tree program, to ask people to pay $50 a tree to pay for bulbs and electricity. We currently have 100 trees we light up from one end to the other. Plus, Carol wrote up a grant to have electricity put in at the other end. It has progressed and now it's big. Instead of cutting down a tree, we decorate the main tree that is there on Lake Street. We've gone from 400 lights to 750 lights. That's a lot of lights.

What has made you the most proud of your job?

I think the parks are a real gem. They are well utilized by a lot of people. The lakefront walkway gets tons of use all the time. We have a lot of organizations that help out in the parks, like with lakefront volunteer days. The Rotarians came and put the lights up on the trees two Saturdays ago. They come in and spend Saturday morning and that's great. We are the support. We make sure the cables run to the trees.

How did it happen that we have the 18-hole disc golf course?

We had the posts for the small course before I was here. But a guy came here from Kalkaska, a disc golf player who played all over the United States - and he told us we had a great spot. He helped design it.

What's the worst part of your job?

I guess that they're some folks that abuse the parks, people that vandalize and damage stuff. It's a minority but it doesn't take much. In a three-day period we had 43 sprinkler heads kicked off. That costs a lot of money to repair. And trash in the parks - that's one of the problems in the skate park. I promised them I would empty it if they just put the trash in the baskets. It's a minority, I know.

What's the best part of your job?

I love working with the organizations, like the Arts Festival, Chestnut Festival and those who use the pavilion. That pavilion is one of the coolest things about our parks. There are gospel concerts, band and jazz concerts, rock the dock for the kids all taking place in the pavilion throughout the summer - people even get married there.

Do you have a career goal to accomplish?

Several of my goals have already been accomplished. I've been throwing around the idea, possibly, of rustic camping with tents and outhouses on the Heritage side of Kenwood Park, behind that and all the way over to Division Street where the trails are. It's a possibility, something I'm kicking around. But I keep pretty busy with everything I do now.

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