RWC’s Recreation, Transportation and Custodial departments to be evaluated for relevance, impact

By Sam Richards

Staff writer

Wednesday, December 10 (3:00 p.m.): The new Community Services Key Performance Indicators (KPI) Task Force will focus its work studying three departments within Community Services ‒ Recreation, Transportation and Custodial ‒ and on the “designated use amenities,” the facilities designed specifically for users of groups that fall within those three categories.

At their second of six planned meetings on Dec. 2, task force members discussed the goal of determining how those Rossmoor amenities can be evaluated for their relevance and impact, and for how big a bang they make for the buck.

The six task force members ‒ with help from two UC Berkeley Haas Business School fellows ‒ want to ultimately discern not only these departments’ impact but where that impact falls short. To help accomplish that goal, they are armed with specifics on the cost per manor for 2026 for each of those three departments, how many full-time-equivalent staff members each has, and those departments’ total 2026 budget.

“The unmet demand is what we’re trying to assess,” Rossmoor General Manager Jeff Matheson told the group. “How many Rossmoor residents have we not been able to honor? And what is the remedy?”

Some Rossmoor amenities, such as the lawn bowling greens, the Gateway art studios and woodshop, and the table tennis building, primarily serve one Rossmoor club. The same concept applies to the buses that the Transportation Department uses to provide its services; those buses primarily serve one group, riders.

But task force member Nancy Castille noted that Rossmoor clubs provide varying levels of support for the designated use amenities they use. Those clubs’ contributions, she said, should factor into any determination of a given amenity’s economic and/or community worth.

“For some people, clubs are the whole Rossmoor experience,” she said.

Ex-officio task force member Dwight Walker said the clubs’ non-resident member levels would also have to be tracked, to see how they affect costs borne by residents.

There also are intangibles that help determine any club’s “value.” While relatively few people may use the woodshop, the knife and other sharpening that its members provide to residents, and the repair of wooden furniture and other objects, present their own kind of value, task force members said.

And some amenities that lose enough users simply disappear. Task force members cited Rossmoor’s equestrian stable, which hosted its last horse in 2003.

Task force member Adrian Byram said part of the group’s job is to discern whether some clubs or other groups are using a disproportionate amount of square footage per user, in a community where space is increasingly at a premium. The data used to accomplish that will have to be compatible with NetSuite, Rossmoor’s relatively new software platform, which he said can assist with the KPI work.

Though many specifics have yet to be determined, task force Chairwoman Susan Hildreth said the general direction is clear. “I think we have a good sense of where we’ll go.”