Public invited to recognize longtime park district commissioner at event tomorrow evening

Islander and longtime Vashon Park District commissioner Bill Ameling will be recognized tomorrow night at an open house and presentation at the Vashon Golf & Swim Club.

By Anneli Fogt • June 8, 2016 12:25 pm

Islander and longtime Vashon Park District commissioner Bill Ameling will be recognized tomorrow night at an open house and presentation at the Vashon Golf & Swim Club.

Ameling was the park board’s first elected commissioner in 1983 and served on the board up until last year when Scott Harvey was elected to replace him amidst controversy about the expense of the VES Fields.

In a Monday interview, he said when he was first elected, there was a park board, but no parks and no money.

“Ruth Anderson and I sold T-shirts and raffle tickets to raise the money for the insurance so we could have a board,” he said. “So it was very humble, grassroots, local beginnings. Gradually, we passed levies and got a little bit of money.”

He said King County then decided that it wanted out of the parks and handed them over to local park districts, and that’s when the district actually received parks to care for. The former CPA took the helm as treasurer and authored the district’s first 17 budgets.

“I knew everything about property taxes, where they came from, how to get them, how much we could have. I knew how the money worked,” he said Monday.

Former park commissioner Truman O’Brien, who served with Ameling from 1994 to 2002, agrees and said he understood “the ins and outs” of government spending and funding, which is “so complex.”

O’Brien also said that the district’s Vashon Commons plan, which was created in the 1990s, outlines the agreement between the park district and the school district that allows public access to the school district’s facilities, is Ameling’s legacy.

“That was the very first commons agreement,” O’Brien said. “The park district and the school district basically got together around the time of the school levy and asked the public not to think of the new school facilities as just for the school, but for the public.”

Ameling said that the park district realized some of its budget should be going toward helping the schools pay for recreation equipment. He added the commons agreement is the “most heavily used park program.”

“I just enjoyed doing it; I loved making things work,” he said.

Park district Executive Director Elaine Ott began working at the district in February of 2013 and was not there for the majority of Ameling’s tenure, but said that his knowledge was helpful.