The Manager's report back on ensuring water play features in all City owned tot lots are in proper working condition

There are 27 parks in the City of Cambridge that have water play features available to children during the warm weather months of the year. (https://www.cambridgema.gov/CDD/parks/waterplaymap). Water play features are generally on and in use from late spring until late fall every year. The time at which they are shut off varies depending on the weather conditions. Water play features in parks adjacent to schools are turned off during the school year.

The water play features are many and varied across the city’s parks, providing a whole variety of different experiences for children who are living in or visiting the city. As with many aspects of the city’s playgrounds the varied nature of the facilities present unique challenges to city and contract staff in trying to maintain them. Specific to the water play features, they are in constant use during hot weather and many have unique control and operational systems that need constant attention in order to ensure they continue to operate.

During the summer of 2018, almost all of the water play features operated satisfactorily. The four that caused most problems this year were; Gannett-Warren Pals off Jefferson

Street, Fulmore Park in Cambridgeport, the Tobin School in west Cambridge and Kemp

playground in the Common. In the cases of Kemp, Warren Pals and Tobin School water play features, the water features have been set to operate continuously throughout the summer from early morning until evening given that the control and valving systems failed to work properly. While these water play features didn’t operate from a play prespective as the design intent, they were available to children throughout the hot weather and as far as we could tell were enjoyed nonetheless.

Unfortunately the Fulmore park water play system needs to be fundamentally rebuilt as it failed to operate throughout the summer even though many of the operating parts were replaced in the spring. The expectation is that it will be fully repaired this fall.

Finally, as is typically expected throughout the summer, there were days when we received, calls, emails and SeeClickFix messages indicating that play features were down in given parks and such were generally fixed within a day or two of us receiving those messages.