By Gretchen Webster

WESTPORT — Jennifer Fava, director of the town’s Parks and Recreation Department for nine years, has resigned to take the same position in Darien. 

“We’ve gotten a lot done and I’m looking forward to other people continuing the progress that we’ve been making,” she said Thursday morning. Her resignation is effective May 8.

During her tenure, the Parks and Recreation Commission initiated the Longshore Capital Improvement Plan, a multi-phase project designed to add and upgrade facilities at the town’s 162-acre waterfront park. And last month, officials also launched plans to assemble a wide-ranging master plan for the town’s other parks and recreation properties, the first such survey in more than three decades.

The Parks and Recreation Department also stated a cost-recovery program to help recoup expenses it incurs for recreational programs offered by the town, as well as maintenance of municipal recreational facilities. The week, in fact, the Board of Selectwomen approved fee increases proposed by Fava and her staff to help recover costs of maintaining athletic fields by adult and youth leagues.

“You’d be hard pressed to find someone who’s put more effort and blood, sweat and tears into what’s best for Westport,” David Floyd, chairman of the Parks and Recreation Commission, said Thursday. “She’s always had the best interests of the Westport community at heart.”

Among Fava’s other accomplishments, Floyd said, are introducing pickleball into Parks and Recreation Department programming, renovating Riverside Park and upgrading Compo Beach bathrooms.

In particular, Floyd cited major improvements to the Longshore Golf Course during Fava’s tenure. “The condition of the golf course is head and shoulders above where it was,” Floyd said. Fava hired a contractor to maintain the golf course, he said, which has made a big difference. “It’s 100 percent better than it was.”

Westporters didn’t always agree with Fava, said Floyd, who was on the initial screening committee when Fava was hired. But she always did what she thought was best for the town, he said.

“It’s a huge loss for Westport,” Floyd added.

A recent controversy that engulfed Fava and the Parks and Recreation Commission concerned the fate of the Westport Community Gardens, located on the Long Lots Elementary School property. The months-long dispute pitted the gardeners, who for two decades have tended plots on the Hyde Lane property, against proponents of athletic fields planned for the new school. In the end, the Planning and Zoning Commission approved a compromise allotting space for both the gardens and new athletic fields on the school property, although the specific sites have yet to be determined by a final site plan.

Fava came to Westport in 2015 from North Hempstead, N.Y., where she held the position of parks and recreation commissioner, similar to the Westport post. Before that, she held other administrative jobs in the recreation sector for other Long Island communities.

She called her departure “a little bittersweet” as she leaves “all the people I’ve worked with over the years — staff, town officials, the commission and volunteers.”

But, she added, “It’s time for a new adventure.”

Freelance writer Gretchen Webster, a Fairfield County journalist for many years, was editor of the Fairfield Minuteman and has taught journalism at New York and Southern Connecticut State universities.