While growing cities and regions of today strive to meet moving level-of-service goal posts and maintain adequate park acreage for swelling populations, older industrial cities in the United States often confront quite the opposite problem – a sense that their park system and its beloved assets are oversized for today’s population, now much smaller than at peak population. Following decades of deindustrialization and destabilized city budgets and service delivery, sustained cuts to public funding for parks and recreation have resulted in long-term deferred maintenance and crippling capital needs. Those are the visible, tangible impacts apparent to citizens and elected officials who call for new capital investments – shiny new spaces, much needed and wanted. But behind the backlog of deferred maintenance, there is the thorough gutting of parks and facilities maintenance teams through the loss of staff positions and low wages and difficult working conditions that cause perpetual vacancies. There is often a striking disconnect between the size of the maintenance crews and the scale of the systems they are tasked to maintain.
This session will present historic budget, population, and agency staffing data from multiple U.S. cities to help contextualize current conditions within distressed park systems, and demonstrate how to shift the narrative away from blame and frustration about current conditions toward more constructive goals for moving the maintenance needle and making the most of limited public funds.
Through looking at historic data, connecting the dots between global or national trends and evolving local realities, and focusing on the nuts-and-bolts of park system operations attendees will discover how to educate the public and their elected representatives and make the case for increased investment that doesn’t just further extend maintenance crews but rather reinforces and rebuilds their capacity so that they may better maintain and sustain the systems in their care for generations to come.