Cedar Rapids parks director Sina retires

CEDAR RAPIDS - The next time you plunge into a city swimming pool, smack a softball or kick a soccer ball on a city field or roast a hot dog in a city park, remember Julie Sina.

Think of Sina, too, the first time you venture out to hear some music at the city's new riverfront amphitheater, slated to open in late summer.

The 58-year-old Cedar Rapids parks and recreation director called it quits this week, retiring after a 34-year run in Cedar Rapids city government.

During that time, she's been in the middle of much - including the city's still-new outdoor swimming pools; the Tuma soccer complex; parks for skateboarders and dog lovers; and the flood of 2008 and its aftermath.

The flood of 2008, which inundated a third of the city's park land as it damaged so much else in the city, transformed Sina's job of running a large city department into more: She and the city's other eight or so department heads became the broad shoulders on which the city mounted its flood recovery.

"It was like, OK, we need to dig out of this," Sina recalls of the first moments and days after the June 2008 flood. "And we sat down and asked, ‘What's the plan? … What are we going to do first and second and 201st and 202nd ? … And now we're just about there."

The city's near-five-year-long flood recovery for Sina's Parks and Recreation Department can be seen in the new outdoor amphitheater on the downtown riverfront; the new Prairie Park Fishery; a new lodge that will coming to Ushers Ferry Historic Village; and an emerging greenway in the 100-year flood plain along the Cedar River.

Sina says she actually postponed her retirement for a couple years to oversee the construction of a replacement for the flood-ruined Time Check Recreation Center, a political football that now looks like it will be built next to Harrison Elementary School in northwest Cedar Rapids.

"I have to breathe on that one," she says.

Sina joined the city's recreation department back in 1979, and within two years, was the city's assistant recreation director. She still has an early 1980s newspaper clipping of her leading an exercise class for seniors, who before her arrival had used city rec programs mostly to play cards and eat potluck.

In 2006, she was the city's director of recreation when the city changed to a city-manager form of government, and the first city manager, Jim Prosser, said the city needed fewer departments and directors. Sina emerged as the director of the larger Parks & Recreation Department.

Over the course of her long tenure in one management post or another at City Hall, she has had to answer to a changing cast of bosses, elected officials and egos. It seems she learned along the way that being right wasn't always the top priority.

"It's the job," says Sina, when talking about the recent frustrations with the rec center project. "You get knocked down, you have set backs and you reassess. Because you know what we're working for - We're working for you and everybody who lives here."

There have been dozens and dozens of ways to displease the public over the years: Remember the idea, ultimately set aside, to sell a piece of the Twin Pines Golf Course for commercial development? Getting a skate park built for kids and a local-option sales tax approved by voters for swimming pools were no easy tasks, but Sina considers both among her most treasured accomplishments.

"I've never been a bully in a China shop," she says. "I've said, ‘Come here, let me show you, let me take you on a tour. … This is what we can do, how we can work together.' And usually people are pretty understanding."

Bill Quinby, a former member of the city's Recreation Commission, easily ticks off a long list of projects that Sina has been part of over the years, and he says he still recalls the day she drove him out to the Tuma farm on the far north of the city to explain how this was going to become a soccer complex one day.

"I have always thought that Julie was very down to earth, very conscientious and a very willing listener," Quinby says.

Dale Todd, who was Sina's boss when he served in the elected post of Parks Commissioner and City Council member

from 1998 through 2001, credits Sina with a central role in the growth of the city's recreational options, and he singles her out for leadership on the pools and skate park projects.

"She has never said, ‘No,' and with today's limited resources, she has always been able to make things work," Todd says.

Dave Smith, who worked alongside Sina and then under her before he retired as parks superintendent in 2009, says Sina always has been "totally immersed" in her job. She was fair and not a fuss-button, trying to "micromanage" employees, he adds.

Smith recalls a time when former City Manager Jim Prosser wanted Sina to figure out how the city might generate more revenue from the public's use of the parks. The idea emerged to charge the Jaycees for use of Greene Square Park for their Uptown Friday Nights events in the summer. Good luck, Smith says Prosser told Sina and him.

This led to a sit-down that extended into an evening, at which at one point, club representatives announced, "What if we don't pay?" remembers Smith. He says the even-minded Sina had the answer, "Then you don't use the park."

The Jaycees paid the user fee and at the end of the summer donated money to the parks system, Smith says.

"I think of Julie's dedication and fairness, her willingness to hammer out the deal," says Smith. "And she worked hard to be a park advocate. She was a fair protector of the park resources."