Ingham County residents packed Tuesday's Board of Commissioners meeting to show support for the county's parks.

"Our parks are so important to our citizens and population of Ingham County," Alfreda Schmidt said.

"So many people I know use the parks every day or every week to run or ski or have picnics," Leslie Kuhn said.

Commissioners still have a budget hole to fill for this current year and considered closing some or all of Ingham County's parks to save money, but Commissioner Dale Copedge assures us, that will not happen in 2010.

"We had some recent discoveries in our budget in the last week or so and we're not going to be proposing, at least at this time, the closure of the parks," Copedge said.

So for now, they've found other ways to fill the gap this year.

"We have some juvenile justice millage dollars that can cover some money that used to come out of the general fund," Commissioner Debbie DeLeon said.

But next year's revenue problems will only worsen for the county. Which is why discretionary dollars, like those spent to maintain these parks, could be the first to be cut in 2011 said DeLeon.

"It could be a variety of options," she said. "We could close one park permanently or we could close several of them for the winter months."

Park supporters are thrilled they'll be able to enjoy these parks all year 'round, but worry what the future will hold.

"We need to keep expressing our support of parks, so there's never any threat of closure," Kuhn said.

The reason the county is in a better financial situation this year than it had originally thought is because the health department was recently granted some federal money to expand services. That, in turn, will bring in more revenue to Ingham County