Doing much with just a few people may be the greatest accomplishment of the city of Umatilla’s Parks and Recreation Department.
Chris Waite is the department’s director, having been hired away from Billings, Montana, where he was a park supervisor, two years ago this June.
Before the park supervisor gig, he was the city’s community outreach coordinator.
With all that wandering, he said his home is La Grande.
“I had done a little bit of teaching in high school in La Grande,” Waite said. “I taught some pottery classes in the summer and I helped coach some youth sports.”
Waite said he also is focused on public service.
“I find it really valuable to work in the community,” Waite said. “It’s a combination of liking parks and recreation and also wanting to be able to give back and support the communities I worked in.”
Pottery a handy skill
Teaching the pottery class at La Grande High School was familiar territory for Waite as he was a fine arts undergrad working in ceramics and sculpture at the Idaho campus of Brigham Young University.
“Since then, I’ve gone back and got my master’s in public administration from the University of Montana,” Waite said.
“Our events pretty much cover all ages,” Waite said. “We have large family events where we get everyone from infants all the way up to grandparents together.”
Those big events can be tremendous. This year Oct. 4-6 will be the city’s second Rock the Locks music festival. This was a major event in October 2023, with ZZ Top as the headliner act.
“For every new program there’s some hiccups and things we learned,” Waite said. “In terms of the city, it was just a nice team effort. It’s such a large operation, three days of music and cleaning and keeping the facility functioning well for everyone and thinking about security.”
Waite said it took the entire city staff coming together to put the festival on, “and now we see what we can accomplish.”
The venue for the festival was the city-owned Big River Golf Course. That’s right, Umatilla owns its own golf course and Waite runs it.
“The city purchased it in 2021 so it’s a recent acquisition,” Waite said. “There were a lot of thoughts behind that, but one was it’s important for us to preserve recreational facilities in the community. It’s a great course and it’s beautiful, right above the Columbia River.”
Events large and small
Waite said the foundation for the music fest was actually programmed before he arrived.
Not quite as elaborate is the annual Umatilla Landing Days, an aquatic-themed celebration that Waite and his crew is making happen June 21-22 this year at the city’s water park on the Columbia River.
Probably third in size is the city’s version of Water Palooza, which takes place July 27 and offers youngsters a long water slide and other features in a very liquid state.
Those are big events, but Waite oversees a lot of smaller programs, but there are many more of them, and they have to happen over the four seasons.
“Obviously the spring, summer and fall are a bit easier for us because people are more happy to get outdoors,” Waite said, “so a lot of what we offer is outdoor programming. For the winter we shuffle a lot of our programs indoors. We do bingo, which is wildly popular. We have little arts and crafts camps for the kids that we do indoors.”
Waite said the city is able to install a skating rink for the wintertime. It’s not real ice, but the surface thinks it is, he said with a smile.
Developing sports
“We’ve been slowly increasing our sports programming, but because we’re a small community we don’t want to duplicate services,” Waite said.
He said the city doesn’t want to copy what public education already offers youth for school-age sports.
“There’s not enough people to run two football programs,” Waite said. “We started pretty small. We started with flag football as our first full program and that’s over-doubled in the last three years, and we’re offering recreational league soccer for the first time this summer.”
Waite said the city also provides skills clinics in baseball and softball prior to the seasons, “just as a support to the local leagues.”
“Each program has a life cycle,” Waite said. “Sometimes we offer a program and hit the 10 people who really wanted it, and we try to run it again. Then there’s not as much enthusiasm the second time around, so we consider ways we can change it or move on to new things.”
City builds accessibility
Waite said he is eager to see the completion of a new playground in Nugent Park, which will culminate in a “Neurodiversity Festival” as the grand opening.
Waite said the new playground will feature a “flat on the ground” circle ride that people confined to wheelchairs can mount and ride.
Workers will begin installing the features in April. A completion date is not yet set, he said, but May is on the wish list.
Waite said his department does frequent survey sampling to make sure the city is on the right track for its recreation programming.
Waite said at two years into his present assignment, “some of our events have over-doubled. One of them went from about 100 people to around 600. It’s been fun seeing the community support us and embrace the things we’re trying to do. It’s just been so rewarding to bring people together in those events and activities.”
