After five years serving as the director of the Snyderville Basin Special Recreation District, Dana Jones has decided to hand over the reins — and unfurl her sails.“I actually am going to go off on another adventure. A friend of mine and I are buying a boat and we are going to do the Great Loop, ” Jones said. “It’s probably going to take us a good year or two to do, so I’ll be living on a boat for a year. It goes all the way up the East Coast, into part of Canada, sometimes through the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi, down to the Gulf and then down around Florida and back up again.”Jones joined Basin Recreation in December 2020, interviewing for the director position on Zoom during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. She was offered the job and moved to Summit County without having visited the area before.“Basin [Recreation] has an unusually large number of trails and open space for a recreation district. Most recreation districts are more focused on recreation facilities, playgrounds, those kinds of things. … I thought it was great with my background in state parks, because I love trails and outdoors, to be able to do something different but still be doing some of the same work that I was doing before,” Jones said.Before moving to Utah, Jones received a degree in recreation administration from California State Polytechnic University and had a successful 28-year career with California State Parks.“I was the northern division chief, so I was in charge of all the parks from the middle of California to the Oregon border,” Jones said. “I retired for about four years and did a lot of traveling, and I enjoyed traveling, but I decided to go back to work.”She said she accepted the job with Basin Recreation because of the great employees and amazing facilities, including one of the largest fenced-in dog parks in the United States.And the district’s growth has been unprecedented since Jones joined the team.“Our budget is about three times what it was six years ago, and we’ve increased the number of programs that we’re providing and the miles of trails,” she said. “I’ve liked being able to manage that growth and manage the staff to make sure everybody has what they need. We have a great staff and a very low turnover rate, and I think it’s because people really like working for this organization, and that’s really important to me.”Ben Castro, who chairs Basin Recreation’s administrative control board, said he’ll miss Jones and her expertise.“She came in when we had a leadership change and we were dealing with COVID, but she stepped in and really helped us with that transition,” Castro said. “She’s helped lead us through quite a few changes. Like, we built Trailside East, we did the expansion at the Run-A-Muk Park, and she led us through Truth in Taxation hearings. It really helped us and ushered in a new level of growth for the district.”Jones will work for Basin Recreation until the end of the year. Castro said the board will create a new committee in April to begin searching for her replacement, but he hopes the next director can start in the summer or fall to overlap with Jones and help with the transition.“I know that her staff and managers are going to miss what she has done, and we just appreciate that she was willing to take a leap, come out here from California, uproot herself and live here and be a part of this,” Castro said. “We just hope she has an amazing second retirement.”The post Basin Recreation director to set sail after retirement appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less