Simplified I say my job is to make sure people in Cottage Grove are having fun and being healthy.”

Parks and Recreation Director Zac Dockter

The Grovecast is posted online monthly at the city website at www.cottagegrovemn.gov/thegrovecast.

Continuing its mission to demystify city government and showcase the human faces behind city government, Said to have international listeners as well as local ones. Hosted by Cottage Grove Communications Director Phil Jents along with Community Development Director Emily Schmitz, the Grovecast featured Parks and Recreation Director Zac Dockter recently, giving insight into how the city parks and recreation department works.
Dockter shared more on what Parks and Recreation does for the city’s residents.
“My job’s awesome,” he said of parks and recreation. “Simplified I say my job is to make sure people in Cottage Grove are having fun and being healthy. Our mission is to promote policies, programs, and places to make sure they can do those things. It sounds like a lot, but really policies, programs, and places is all we do, right? We try to make sure Cottage Grove is as fun to live in as possible, making sure they’re getting outside, making sure they’re enjoying nature and staying active. So that’s it, in a nutshell.”
Originally from Cottage Grove and a graduate of Park High School with the Class of 1995, Dockter went to college to be a math major, until he sat in a library doing math equations as a freshman.
“There has to be something better than sitting three hours in the college library solving math equations while all my friends are out playing football,” Dockter said of the thought process that eventually led to him becoming the city’s parks and recreation department head. Changing to business finance and using this in different capacities, Dockter was working at the Princeton Ice Arena when he saw an ad to become the city’s parks and recreation director. Rejected the first time, Dockter was hired on round two, starting as the city’s ice arena manager and later promoted to parks and recreation director, now in his 24th year of city employment.
“It’s not just like the TV show,” he said the Cottage Grove Parks and Recreation Department. “There’s a lot of moving parts.”
With over 2500 acres of open space to take care of, Dockter said the number one call that parks and recreation gets is related to trees.
“It doesn’t matter if they’re dead or alive,” he said of city trees and the public. “People are concerned when they go down, they’re concerned when they go up, and they’re concerned when we keep them and they’re concerned when we can’t keep them.”
The second side of the department was recreation, including building rentals and events, as well as the ice arena.
“One of the best facilities in the state, in this guy’s opinion,” Dockter said of the ice arena built in the 1970s. “When you go out and about they say, ‘oh the place with the rink.’”
Not left out for mention was the River Oaks Golf Course.
“Lots of operation, lots going on, but it’s all based around that word ‘fun,’” he said of the voter approved golf course off Highway 61.
A prairie buff, meanwhile, Dockter talked up open space on the Grovecast, saying projects that other’s might consider ho-hum were “generational” to him.
“People are going to enjoy this for the next 100 years,” he said of generational projects. Dockter said the city Parks and Recreation Department is based around customer service.
“If you have problems there you’re going to have problems elsewhere,” he said.
With acres of parks to maintain and programs to recreate, the Parks and Recreation Department works hard to keep city parks in shape.
The Grovecast is posted online monthly at the city website at www.cottagegrovemn.gov/thegrovecast.