Stefel Deserves Design Credit

As Dottie Gutenkauf points out, April Stefel played a significant role in bringing about the peninsula at Park and Ninth. Read Plaintalker's post here.

She also designed a roof garden for The Monarch condominium complex that was more in keeping with city expectations than the bare deck with potted shrubs that the developer had substituted for an earlier plan. Read about it at this link.

April also made many other valuable contributions before she and several other city employees were laid off in 2010.

From a Plaintalker post: in March 2010:

Several residents spoke in favor of retaining April Stefel, a certified landscape architect in the Planning Division who is staff liaison to the Shade Tree Commission and manages several other programs, including brownfields studies.

Shade Tree Commission Chairman Gregory Palermo praised Stefel for her “marvelous success” in coming up with grants for tree planting and maintenance.

“The grant money should be thought of as found money,” he said, “but it is not going to be found unless someone is looking for it.”

Stefel herself explained that she is responsible for more than $5.6 million in grants and that she had suggested her pay could be given back from various grants, but an analysis she made in December was lost or never given to the administration. She detailed the work she puts in to report to state agencies on grant-funded programs, saying the brownfields work alone takes up half her 63 part-time hours per month.

Those who worked with April miss her energy and passion for the Queen City.

--Bernice