Reception salutes outgoing parks chief
TONY BROWN/DAILY FORUM
Retiring Maryville Parks & Recreation Director Rod Auxier slices into a cake during a reception held in his honor Thursday at the Maryville Community Center. Also pictured are Aquatics Center/Recreation Supervisor Shelly Hersh, left, and MCC Supervisor Kaley Coulter.
Surrounded by friends and co-workers in the upstairs meeting room of the community center he played a key role in bringing into being back in the early 2000s, Maryville Parks & Recreation Director Rod Auxier called it a career Thursday amid cake, punch, smiles, handshakes, and affectionate best wishes for the future.
Many local residents who exercise, lift weights, play basketball, and run at the Maryville Community Center, or who picnic in the city’s parks, watching their children swing in the swings and slide down the slides, can’t remember a time when Auxier wasn’t in charge of the way Maryville folks play and relax.
The low-key Auxier has earned this city’s respect and gratitude through 30 years — minus a couple of months — of dedicated service and steady improvements to the municipal parks system.
But reflecting on his career Thursday, Auxier worked the gratitude equation from the other direction.
“This community has been so supportive,” he said. “They made my job one that I have thoroughly enjoyed. I can’t say I ever dreaded coming to work.”
When he came to Maryville in 1986 from Peoria, Illinois, where he served as that city’s sports activities director, Auxier said he was looking for four things: a smaller community in which to raise his children, someplace closer to family members (Auxier grew up in Gower), a chance to serve at a director level, and a city that had a parks and recreation department with its own administrative structure and revenue stream.
Maryville struck on all cylinders, and Auxier made the most of it.
On Thursday, he credited the system of placing Maryville Parks & Rec under its own board and funding operations with a dedicated property tax as a big reason he has been above to register major accomplishments, such as the creation of Donaldson Westside Park and construction of the Maryville Aquatics Center.
“That’s really why we’ve been able to grow,” he said, adding that citizens have been able to see what they’re getting for their money, and that he hasn’t had to compete for municipal funding with other city agencies, such as police or public works.
“Parks and rec (in other cities) usually doesn’t come out very high on that totem pole,” he said.
After all these years, Auxier said he is probably most proud of Donaldson Westside Park, a multi-field sports complex completed in 2001.
When the park was conceived, he said, the goal was to build it without using tax money. And so he helped orchestrate a successful million-dollar fundraising effort.
In order to get the most bang for the buck, Auxier said “90 percent” of the work of building the park was accomplished internally by Parks & Recreation staff members.
Now that he’s retired — his official exit date is Feb. 1 — Auxier said the next chapter in his life remains an open book. He wants to take a road trip to the West for the next “two or three or four weeks” and maybe play some golf and do a little rock climbing.
In other words, after 30 years in the recreation business, it’s time to play.
Auxier’s successor is already on deck. Late last year, the Maryville Parks & Recreation Board announced that Aaron Dobson had been selected as the quasi-independent city agency’s new director. He will be the seventh director since the board took over the park system from the city in 1972.
Dobson holds a bachelor’s degree in corporate wellness and recreation from Northwest Missouri State University and most recently served as parks superintendent for the City of Rockwall, Texas, where he previously worked as recreation superintendent.
Like Auxier, Dobson will be responsible for administering the city’s 10 public parks containing a combination of playground equipment, shelter houses, picnic areas, athletic courts, a skateboard course, and playing fields for baseball, football, soccer, and softball.
Parks & Rec also controls the Maryville Community Center, which features a full-size gymnasium, walking-running track, weight room, and aerobics room, and the Maryville Aquatics Center adjoining Beal Park on the east side of town.
