Behind the Parks: Meet Andrew Erenpreiss of the Roving Crew

Hometown and Background

I grew up in Columbus with mom and dad, elder brother Matthew and younger sister Emilija. Our family surname, Erenpreiss, and my sister’s first name, are Latvian. My grandfather on my father’s side grew up in Latvia but escaped and moved to the United States during the war, as first the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany, and then the Soviet Union again occupied his country. He settled in Springfield, Ohio and went to the local Wittenberg University. My brother Matthew also went to Wittenberg University, and so did I, after I’d graduated from Centennial High School. I completed a four-year degree at Wittenberg and graduated with a BSc in Wildlife Management in 2015.

I had always loved the outdoors and a degree in Wildlife Management seemed the ideal complement for my dream job of working as a wildlife officer for ODNR. I had great fun studying at Wittenberg. We did some fascinating and unusual wildlife surveys, including one study to determine the preferred habitat of mice, in woods or in prairies, and lots of radio telemetry exercises, mostly at an isolated property up in Michigan that was owned by the school.

I applied for a wildlife officer position with ODNR after graduating. There were just a handful of openings, but around about 14,000 applicants. I spoke to quite a lot of fellow applicants, especially during the first phase of interviewing, which was the physical exams. Wildlife officer positions are considered law enforcement positions, and I discovered that all the fellow applicants I spoke to had a military or law enforcement background. The physical exams held no worries for me. Like law enforcement officers, we were timed for a 1.5-mile run, for pushups and situps, and I passed those tests. I was granted a sit-down interview and was congratulated on getting through to the top half of all those 14,000 applicants. But I didn’t get one of the open positions.

I was used to working in my spare time. Before college, I had worked cutting lawns for a business owned by the grandfather of a friend of mine, which occupied a few hours of my weekends during the growing season. And while at college, I gained experience in vehicle maintenance on my summer vacations by working as a car mechanic at a shop in Hilliard. Also during my time at university, I worked with a good buddy of mine, Kyle, cutting the fairways and greens at the Old Reed Golf Course in Springfield.

Although I was disappointed not to get my dream ODNR job, I found work soon after as a building technician with the Franklin Country Board of Developmental Disabilities. He didn’t help me get the job, but my dad also works there, in the board’s finance department. I was part of a team of six technicians based near the Columbus Airport. We would open up the various schools and other buildings operated by the board across central Ohio, check the boilers were working and unlock doors, as needed, before performing whatever maintenance tasks had been ordered online by the board’s teachers and staff.

Eventually I saw a job advertisement for a park technician at Sharon Woods Metro Park. I applied for and interviewed for the job and was successful. I started at Sharon Woods in April 2018. As well as the usual park maintenance duties, such as vehicle maintenance, park cleanups and mowing, I also volunteered for the Metro Parks deer team, to help maintain healthy populations of deer in the parks, and for the prescribed burn team, which burns prairie and grassland areas to help eradicate invasive species and set the optimum conditions for new and healthier growth of native plants.

In March 2021 I applied for a transfer opportunity to my current role, as a park technician on the Roving Crew.

What I do at Metro Parks and what I love most about it

The Roving Crew is Metro Parks’ own construction crew. We’re able to take on bigger jobs than an individual park’s maintenance crew can take on, and we have access to bigger and more powerful equipment, including off-road dump trucks, haul trucks, excavators, backhoes, bulldozers and skid steers. We also rent equipment for special jobs.

There used to be seven of us on the Roving Crew, but for the moment we are temporarily down to four. When I started in 2021, my first big job was a conservation and wetlands project at Battelle Darby Creek Metro Park. This Memory Lane Wetlands project was completed in cooperation with the Nature Conservancy, and with funding via various bat mitigation programs. We used large rented excavators, rollers and ground compactors to dig down to the clay base and create a wetland habitat of nine wetland cells on a roughly 11-acre site. As well as creating new wetlands, we installed four bat poles, which stand about 30 feet high and have an artificial tree bark at the top. This leather pouch simulates the sloughing bark of a dead tree and is used by bats for roosting.

Our Roving Crew team also spent the best part of two years working at Quarry Trails Metro Park, creating roadways, scoping out and laying the base layers for roads and trails. We also built a parking lot and a seating wall for the park’s dog park.

For many months now, we’ve been working extensively at Bank Run Metro Park, which we hope will be ready to open later this year. We still have lots to do here, but so far we’ve done all the base work for the new parking lots and roadways, by first stripping lots of top soil down to clay, and using much of that excavated dirt and clay to build up the roadways. We’ve just installed drainage around the newly-constructed ‘Big Shelter,’ an 80 foot by 80 foot open shelter that will eventually host up to 299 people for picnics or meetings. We installed about 300 feet of these huge 8-inch-diameter drainage pipes around all four sides of the shelter.

Bank Run has two distinct areas, the old Hoover Y Park, and the old Olsen Quarry. Once we’ve finished in the Hoover Y area we’ll move on to constructing a multiuse asphalt trail around the old quarry lake. This will complete a 5K route, with a short section of it in the Hoover Y area. Another major project that we’ll get to soon, once all the permits have been obtained, is the completion of a trail extension and bike path at Sharon Woods Metro Park.

What I love most about working on the Roving Crew is that we’re not fixed to working at just one park. We go wherever we’re needed, from park to park. I also love using all the big equipment, and especially the excavator.

My favorite Metro Parks story that includes a memorable visitor interaction

On the Roving Crew we don’t get to interact with park visitors very often. We’re usually operating one of those huge machines in out of the way areas of a park, but I did enjoy quite a lot of conversations with visitors when I worked on building the seating wall at the Quarry Trails Dog Park. Basically we faced an existing concrete wall on both side with a variety of stones. People kept coming up to us asking what we were doing. Regular visitors were keen to compliment us on our progress and tell us how good it was looking. It took us about two weeks to finish the job. As well as the stone facing, we installed six white oak stained and sanded blocks on top, for visitors to sit on, and also poured new concrete tops too. We sanded down the white oak blocks at our carpentry shop at Blendon Woods Metro Park, and also built a very large bulletin board which we installed outside the dog park.

Building bulletin boards is one of our regular winter projects. We use treated cedar wood for the main structure, and pine for the tongue and groove joints, with the roof made of shingles. It takes about a week for a team of three of us to build one large bulletin board. They’re 6 feet wide and 4 feet high. We make three or four of these every winter, and usually the same amount of somewhat smaller bulletin boards.

My favorite Metro Parks activity

I love being outdoors, which is what my job on the Roving Crew offers me. I don’t have much spare time for using the parks after work, as I’m frequently engaged with second jobs outside of park work hours. I’ve built up small businesses of my own by word of mouth over the years, ever since I started at Metro Parks. I power wash houses and concrete structures, and also work on vehicle maintenance. I’m occupied with this most nights, although I try to restrict working on weekends, so I can spend time with my family. Occasionally I’ll work a Saturday if it’s a big job that I couldn’t complete in one night, like a six-hour power clean of a concrete driveway in Upper Arlington that I worked on recently.

Fun facts about me and my family

1. Limbo! I met my wife Rachel while limbo dancing at a bar in Cincinnati back in 2015. I was there with a group of us to celebrate my friend, Kyle’s 22nd birthday, and Rachel was there with a bunch of friends giving a send off to one of them who was joining the Navy. We liked our style of dancing and got chatting, then dated after that. At the time, Rachel was studying at the University of Cincinnati and graduated in 2017. She moved to Columbus after graduating and we got married in May 2023. Last November we had our first baby, a gorgeous girl who we named Raelynn. We just bought a new house in Mount Vernon, which is about an hour’s drive away from our Roving Crew base at Blacklick Woods.

2. Family trips! Every summer, ever since I was a kid, our family gets together for a vacation in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. My parents and grandparents both have condos down there. They rent them out to friends for different weeks of the year, but we always have one of the prime spots, in August. Me and my brother Matthew love to go fishing in the ocean, but for nearly everyone else it’s mostly a matter of just lazing around and enjoying the sun and ocean. Our extended family is beginning to grow so much that we’ve taken recently to splitting the weeks, as there are too many of us to fit comfortably in the two condos.

Rachel’s family also has a vacation spot that’s available to us. Although Rachel is a native of Cincinnati, her family owns property on Washington Pond in Maine. Her grandmother was born and raised there, and still lives in the same cabin where she grew up. Although it’s called Washington Pond, it’s actually a huge 565-acre lake, and is great for boating and fishing. Rachel and I spent our two-week honeymoon at her gran’s cabin. We’re excited at the prospect of spending more time there in the future

3. A’hunting we will go! When I was growing up, my brother Matthew, who’s five years older than me, taught me how to go bow hunting. We did it on property then owned by my grandparents, and which Matthew and his family now live at. It’s a 45-acre estate and we still love to hunt there, mostly for deer. Matthew and I also like to go duck hunting together. We put in for many of the duck hunt lotteries, and ask a number of folks that own ponds if we can hunt on their property. Most of them agree and have become friends of ours. We have no shortage of opportunities.

Traveling – places I’ve been, places I’d love to go

I’ve already mentioned our annual vacation spot in Myrtle Beach and the cabin at Washington Pond where Rachel and I spent our honeymoon. But there was a really special trip I did back in 2012. I went with my grandfather to visit Latvia, and got to see the house where he grew up. The house itself was still standing, but no one lived in it. The land was owned by a Russian family, and they had built a new house on site. We went through a private gate to get to the land and my grandpa spoke to the owners in both Latvian and Russian. They were happy to let us spend time there and look around. I don’t speak any Latvian or Russian myself, so I didn’t understand anything being said, but it was so cool to see the place where my grandpa was born and raised.

We also saw loads of old castles and historical mansions on our trip, and I was introduced to an extended family member and the owner of a famous bicycle factory. Gustavs Ērenpreiss Bicycle Factory was founded in 1927 in the Latvian capital of Riga. By the late 1930s it had become the largest manufacturer of bicycles in all the Baltic states. It operated until 1942, when it shut down because of the war. After the war, the factory was reopened by the Soviet Union and operated as the Red Star Riga Bicycle Factory. Latvia secured its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. In 2010, Toms Ērenpreiss, the great-grand-nephew of the original owner of the bicycle factory, founded a new company. He had spent a number of years repairing old Ērenpreiss bikes and making new parts for them, but then gathered together with other professionals to found The Ērenpreiss Bicycle Factory and hand make new models of bikes based on the originals. The company was later renamed Ērenpreiss Originals. They’re great bikes, and Toms actually sent some models over to my grandpa and father here in America, which we still have. While I was there, I participated in a promotional event for the company, and rode one of a relative’s bikes.

We had flown from Columbus to Detroit, then on to Paris, and finally to Riga, in Latvia. During out trip we also visited the other Baltic states of Estonia and Lithuania. It was fantastic to spend so much quality time with my grandpa and to experience a totally different culture.

My favorite food and dessert

My favorite meal, growing up, and I still love it today, is sauerkraut, mashed potatoes and pork. It’s really simple to make, but also really delicious. Rachel and I share the cooking and can both make it. We pan sear the pork chops then sit them on top of the sauerkraut and bake them in the oven. We add butter and milk to the mashed potatoes and serve them with a glass of milk, which goes great with the meal.

For dessert, my favorite is the coconut cake that my mom makes. She always makes one for me for my birthday, and also for many of our family get togethers. It’s a white cake with coconut flavored frosting and shredded coconut on top. It’s great with coffee.

My favorite entertainment

Unfortunately, in many ways, I just love watching the Cleveland Browns, even though they stink most of the time. Rachel, being a native of Cincinnati, is actual a big Bengals fan, so we have some interesting family moments when the two teams play each other twice a season. One year, we went to a Browns-Bengals game together, up at Cleveland Browns Stadium. Boy, was it cold there in the stadium! It was a late season game and I was freezing. But I managed a little warmth thanks to a Browns win. I like watching baseball too, although I rarely get to see a game, as I’m working most evenings. There is no family hostility when it comes to baseball, as both Rachel and I support the Cincinnati Reds.

I don’t go to the movies much, but I have a favorite movie that I’ve watched a few times. It’s The Boondock Saints, about fraternal twin brothers who become vigilantes, along with a friend of theirs. Their mission is to clear out the criminal underworld in Boston, and consider it God’s work at the point of a gun.

We have Netflix and Amazon Prime at home and Rachel and I like to find something we can both enjoy. One show that we both liked was Ozark, about the trials and tribulations of a family that washes drug money for their living. It’s one we’d like to watch again at some point. Another show that I enjoyed a lot, but which Rachel wasn’t so keen on, was Breaking Bad, which has become quite famous.

Why I love working at Metro Parks

I really love working with the Roving Crew team. They’re a great bunch of guys. I’ve learned so many new skills by working with them, and I also love the fact we never know from one week to the next what might come up and which parks we might need to work at next.

Andrew Erenpreiss was talking to Communications Coordinator, Virginia Gordon

What Roving Crew Manager Michael Shaeffer says about Andrew

“Andrew is a dedicated asset to the team. He consistently brings a positive attitude and a steady work ethic, always willing to take on new challenges and learn new things. He is always supportive of our projects and routinely asks what he can do to help. His contributions have been invaluable to Metro Parks, particularly over the past year as he is the only Tech 1 on the Roving Crew.”