Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Parks Strategic Plan topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Draft parkland "level of service" draws praise for inventory and questions about method, shoreline and schools
Summary
Staff presented a detailed inventory and draft level-of-service (LOS) standards as part of the Parks and Recreation strategic plan; commissioners and residents praised the data work but raised concerns about methodology, the role of school fields, shoreline acreage and the need for an explicit vision before final recommendations.
City staff and consultants presented the draft parkland level-of-service (LOS) analysis on March 12 as a component of the Parks and Recreation strategic plan, showing a newly verified inventory of parks and amenities and proposing recommended service standards to guide future park investments.
Assistant Community Services Director Christine Crosby, project lead for the strategic plan, told the commission the team remeasured roughly 75 sites, reconciled city GIS and assessor records, and updated acreages used for planning and maintenance. Crosby said the review found some school-site acreages that were previously overstated; she cited Vargas Elementary School as an example, where the field acreage was updated from 3.39 acres to 1.58 acres after accounting for campus changes and city-maintained areas under the new joint-use agreement with the school district.
Consultant Nilay Bhatt of Next Practice Partners said the inventory is unusually granular, down to hours of access by field type and seasonality, and that the recommended LOS figures are a synthesis of public input, operational realities and trends rather than a single national standard. "This is meant to be a living, breathing document," Bhatt said, adding that recommendations are intended to be updated as new data or facilities come online.
Staff proposed a method to prorate school fields toward the city's parkland goal based on annual public access hours. Crosby said the exercise compared school-field hours available to the public with typical city-park hours and produced percentage factors (for example, a school field without lights might be counted at a lower percentage than a lighted middle-school field). She said the approach was intended to reflect access rather than raw acreage.
Shoreline Park acreage was also segmented. Crosby described three Shoreline classifications: regional park acres (areas accessible during normal park hours), special-use acres (fee-based facilities such as Shoreline Golf Links and Shoreline Lake) and passive open space (habitat or environmentally sensitive areas). Staff recommended counting 172 acres of Shoreline under the regional park portion toward the city's parkland goal and treating the remainder as special use or passive open space.
Public commenters and multiple commissioners praised the inventory work but raised objections and questions about LOS choices. Resident Rashmi said the LOS table "seems to stray significantly from the feedback provided by the public," noting survey respondents prioritized trees, grassy areas and pedestrian/bicycle connections and ranked splash pads and pickleball lower; she urged LOS calculations to include climate-resiliency considerations. Other commenters pressed staff to show the underlying data and methodology in more detail.
Commissioners emphasized the need to pair the LOS data with a clearly stated vision and goals before adopting specific standards. Commissioner Michener called the school-hour approach "a defensible methodology" but recommended a footnote clarifying the joint-use agreement is temporary and school availability may change. Several commissioners suggested adjusting terminology (for example, replacing "passive" and "active" with intensity-based categories) and requested more clarity on how Shoreline segments were classified and how they align with wildlife and burrowing-owl plans.
Crosby acknowledged a corrected arithmetic error staff found in attachment 1 (a developed-park-acres total changed from 351.91 to 299.74) and said staff will continue refining the inventory, prepare equity maps and include the 2020 census population by planning area before delivering a draft strategic plan to the commission in June. Staff said the Nexus study for parkland impact fees will run in parallel and is a separate project.
Next steps: staff will produce draft equity maps, finalize the draft strategic plan for a June commission review and prepare the plan for council review. Commissioners and several residents urged an iterative process and greater transparency on methodology and recommended standards before final adoption.
