Person · 2014

Margaret Hannon-Rizza

Died	2014-02-19
Recreation Commission
In Office	1987 - 1995

Margaret Hannon-Rizza, known to everyone as Peggy, spent nearly three decades building up public recreation in Billerica, first as a volunteer commissioner and then as the town's professional recreation staff. She was appointed to the Recreation Commission in June 1987, when Joseph Higgins Jr. was the town's Recreation Supervisor, and served as the commission's secretary through the late 1980s and early 1990s, winning reappointment to terms running to 1991, 1994 and 1997. She resigned from the commission in September 1995 to join the department itself.

By 1996 she was Assistant Director under Director Joseph Higgins, at a time when the commission's stated goal was a permanent recreation facility for the town. Her work reached beyond ball fields: in 1998 the Conservation Commission reported that it was working with her and Selectman Ellen Rawlings to identify points of public access and canoe launch sites along the Concord River, an effort it continued to report through 2002. From 2000 she also sat on the Open Space and Recreation Committee, which kept her involved in the town's long range planning for parks and conservation land.

In 2006 she took charge of the department, listed first as Recreation Supervisor and soon signing the annual reports as Director, with the professional credentials CTRS (Certified Therapeutic Recreation Specialist) and CPRP (Certified Park and Recreation Professional). Her reports from those years describe canoe access at Winning Pond and the Route 4 bridge, the town's management of Manning State Park, the first phase of the Lampson Recreation Complex, the Kids Konnection playground, and a bike trail link toward the Minuteman Bikeway. She represented Recreation on the Cabot Land Re-use Committee from 2008, and as a town meeting member she argued her department's case on the floor. In 2011 she spoke for $30,000 to paint and seal the new tennis courts at the Lampson complex, and in September 2012 she presented the dog park off-leash by-law to the Rules Committee, which recommended it unanimously.

Health problems led her to decide to retire in 2013. That year the complex at Campbell Road and Ed Hayes Way, which includes the Lampson football field, was formally dedicated as the Peggy Hannon-Rizza Recreation Complex in recognition of her decades of service. At the fall town meeting on October 10, 2013, she spoke for the transfer of the two-acre Micozzi Beach on Nuttings Lake, named for Nicola Micozzi, from conservation to park and recreation use, and the article carried 148 to 1.

She died on February 19, 2014. The town's memorial list for that year credited her with service on the Recreation Commission from 1985 to 2014, as Assistant Director of Parks and Recreation from 1995 to 2006, and as Director from 2006 to 2014. In 2014 the Recreation Commission asked the spring town meeting for $400,000 to match a state PARC grant for renovations to the complex that bears her name, but the meeting dismissed the article.

Margaret Hannon-Rizza

Margaret Hannon-Rizza

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