Changing Captains
MLR will seek new Executive Director when Rich Boccia’s contract expires in June.
At the February 13 Mammoth Lakes Recreation (MLR) Board of Directors Meeting, Board President Tom Johnson announced that the group had decided not to renew current Executive Director Rich Boccia’s contract when it is up on June 30 of this year.
Boccia was the first Executive Director hired to run the non-profit since it was started three years ago. His contract was a two-year deal, and Johnson said the decision reflects a pivot in the organization’s development, not a failure on the part of Boccia. “I think the board unanimously feels that we hired the right founding Executive Director… he represented the organization with pride and intelligence in all ways and stepped up in every area in which we asked him to step up, something that somebody from outside of this community couldn’t have done.”
In an interview this week, Johnson said that Boccia helped to streamline the administration of Measure R and U Funds by matching the allocation process with the town’s fiscal cycle and providing feedback and better guidelines for how to apply for those funds. “We have two real problems that we [MLR] need to address. First, we have all of these big capital projects on the table, and we have significant funding gaps on all of them. Second, we don’t at this time have enough developed programming to ultimately sustain those facilities if they were built.” Johnson said that MLR needs to build a fund development program to address those funding gaps, and that requires a skillset that Boccia himself says he doesn’t have.
