Butch Kisiah lands on his feet in Chapel Hill

The Chapel Hill News has the story of Butch Kisiah, who left Asheville’s Parks and Recrecation Department to take on the parks & rec director’s job there. Asheville’s loss was Chapel Hill’s gain:

CHAPEL HILL — The town’s new parks and recreation director has big ideas for the town’s parks, landscaping, downtown and public spaces.

Butch Kisiah, on the job less than a year, worked in Asheville’s parks and recreation department for 23 years before moving to Chapel Hill.

There, he learned a lot about making a downtown vibrant, he told the Friends of the Downtown on Thursday.

He also said Chapel Hill’s parks desperately need improvement.

Kisiah showed pictures of parks around town. Each showed broken benches, bent fences, grass fields with bare spots, damaged scoreboards or torn goals.

“Chapel Hill’s parks are getting old,” Kisiah said.

Most were built in the 1970s, he said, and some haven’t been repaired since then.

This week some deteriorating wooden light poles at Cedar Falls Park on Weaver Dairy Road will be demolished because they’re hazardous and unsafe.

“This is my poster child here,” he said, pointing to pictures of Cedar Falls Park. “It’s a beautiful piece of property, but it needs to be kept up with.”

Kisiah wants to bring more activities downtown, such as concerts, outdoor movies and festivals.

But not just any festival. The town ended Apple Chill after repeated violence. He wants to make sure future events serve the community.

He also has some suggestions of his own.

City Center Park was considered Asheville’s front yard, Kisiah said. The park played host to Shindig on the Green, Asheville’s big bluegrass festival every year.

Asheville has one of the most vibrant downtowns in the country, he said, but it took time to get there.

He said last month’s Earth Action Day on the roof of the Wallace Parking Deck on East Rosemary Street was great, but it could have had even higher turnout if the venue had been visible from Franklin Street.

Kisiah sees potential in McCorkle Place — a quad stretching from Franklin Street to South Building, where the chancellor’s office is located — because it’s wide and grassy.

But some at Thursday’s meeting said the first step has to make downtown attractive enough to entice people. One step, they said, would be to keep the planters on the sidewalks blooming and steadily watered. The big question was: Who’s going to water them?

Kisiah agreed.

“I think downtown needs a little color,” he said. And he wants to implement regular downtown cleanups. But that philosophy should also be applied to gateways into town and public housing facilities, he said.

“I want to look at Chapel Hill as a park,” he said. “It’s a beautiful place, and it needs a nice, eye-appealing downtown to keep people coming.”