The City of London Ohio

The second department that the city administration has is known as the Public Service Department. This consists of today all non-safety forces except that the City of London has created a Board of Public Utilities. This leaves two departments that would qualify as the Service Department . The first is the Street Maintenance Department and the second is Parks and Recreation.

The Parks and Recreation Department maintains along with the Street Maintenance Department all of the parks in the City of London. The City has numerous parks with different functions throughout the city: Merrimac Park, which has both active and passive use opportunities; Bert Wheeler Park, which is currently leased to the London Area Baseball Council (LABC); Cowling Park, which is divided into two areas: one is a passive use and the most commonly used park in the City of London, which contains our shelter house and our gazebo; the other is an active use area along Park Avenue. Currently we have one ball field and will soon have a couple of basketball courts and a skate park in the area that used to be known as the tennis courts. Diagonally across MacLean from the city park is the municipal swimming pool, originally built in 1939 by a federal government program and continues to be used today by the residents and non-residents of the City of London. The other area in which the city has parks would be the conversion of the old rail lines to bicycle paths known as the Rails to Trails. The city has numerous parks that are under consideration for development and will be developed as the land and money becomes available.

The City Maintenance Department handles all of the maintenance for the streets, including pothole repair, snowplowing in the wintertime, salting of the streets as necessary, and is responsible for maintaining the traffic lights as well as the downtown nostalgia series street lights. The Maintenance Department is also responsible for any kind of miscellaneous project that becomes available. They are responsible for maintaining their own equipment, wherever possible. During the summer they do their best to not only fill the potholes but they are responsible for maintaining the storm sewer system; so you will see them rebuilding catch basins, doing basic maintenance to catch basins, and assisting the utilities’ water department, sewer department, wherever possible with heavier equipment.