City plans Brand Park changes

Inside the living room of a Northwest Glendale home Monday night, Hauck spoke to about a dozen homeowners association members about the strain on his department — or lack thereof.

The city has four park ranger positions, two of which are currently vacant. That leaves two rangers, who have been pigeonholed into being enforcers of the law at the expense of their typical naturalistic and interpretive duties, Hauck said.

Since the rangers are usually the first to be dispatched to crime calls in the city's parks, they spend most of their time writing citations and performing arrests, he said.

"So we're doing nothing but what a police officer does," he said.

It has been hard to attract or retain more rangers for that very reason, he added.

It also doesn't help that rangers typically make about $2,400 a year less than a police officer, and that's without the beefed-up benefits and retirement of a police officer, Hauck said.

That makes it hard to compete with under-staffed police departments that are aggressively recruiting new officers, he added.

"It's a function of numbers," he said.

Pay rates and staffing levels for the ranger program are problems that need to be addressed soon as the city takes a look at how to effectively monitor all of Glendale's parks, Chapjian said.

"It's really hard to monitor the parks with just four bodies," he said. "We need to take a look at the pay scale."

But before that can happen, Mayor Ara Najarian said, the community will need to decide what role they want their rangers to play.

"Do we want to turn them into more of a police force and less of a naturalists?" he said. "How important are those naturalist duties to the community weighed against the additional law enforcement component of their work?"

And if rangers were to officially move closer to law enforcement, their salaries would "need to approach those of police officers," he said.

But Northwest Glendale Homeowners Assn. Peter Faud said it would be a shame to abandon the park ranger's educational aspect, and for his part, Hauck said the reason he and his colleagues take the job is for its diversity.

After the latest round of changes are in place at Brand Park, Najarian said the city will likely wait a couple of months before assessing their impact.