Improving Pittsburgh’s parks won’t be easy

Sixteen summers ago, when Pittsburgh was sacking hundreds of cops and crossing guards, and shutting down swimming pools, recreation centers and senior centers by the score, I wouldn’t have had a conversation like I had with Jayne Miller the other day.

The Pittsburgh of 2003 was broke. Today’s Pittsburgh is not. So I went to Ms. Miller’s South Side office to ask the head of Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy why it’s petitioning to have a referendum this November on whether to raise city property taxes by a half- mill. ( That would be 50 bucks on each $ 100,000 of assessed value.)

That $ 10 million raised each year would “establish a dedicated Parks Trust Fund ... to: improve, maintain, create and operate public parks ... ( and) secure matching funds and services from a charitable parks conservancy.” Funding parks in underserved neighborhoods, and assuring citizen participation and full public disclosure of spending — all that’s in the referendum, too.

I’m in one city park or another nearly every day and don’t have to be persuaded they need help. But couldn’t the city find more money for parks among its current revenue streams? City Controller Michael Lamb, a political rival of Mayor Bill Peduto, says the city is on pace to “see a significant

surplus” this year, with all tax categories at least holding steady or growing.

“I don’t disagree with Michael Lamb that the economy is better here in Pittsburgh,” Ms. Miller said, “but where did we start? We didn’t start at a place where we had the resources we need.”

The parks, like so much else in Pittsburgh, have been underfunded for 40 years. She counts 165 park locations, taking in everything down to the tot lots, and the city may soon add 600 acres of Hays Woods to the 2,256 park acres it has. Some 151 of those parks don’t even have master plans, Ms. Miller said.

I don’t know that every little slice of green needs a master plan. This city could use fewer committee meetings and more mowing, paving and paint jobs. But I have little reason to argue with Ms. Miller’s contention, reached after a year- plus “listening tour” throughout the city, that it could take $ 125 million just to do basic park upgrades, and much more to do the capital projects. Even this tax increase would not cover the backlog, she said. That would take an additional $ 33 million a year, and “the city doesn’t have it.”

Maybe, but Pittsburgh already ranks 22nd among the nation’s 100 largest cities on the Trust for Public Land’s rankings for park access, acreage, investment and amenities. Ms. Miller arrived here late in 2017 from Minneapolis, where she managed the city’s parks department, and those parks consistently rank at or near the nation’s best. The conservancy provided data showing Pittsburgh’s per capital spending on parks is a fraction of what Minneapolis spends, and we even trail Cleveland.

But Pittsburghers would guess we also rank pretty high on paying property taxes. That’s one reason some have been rankled by the conservancy’s $ 200,000 campaign to gather the nearly 12,500 valid signatures needed to get this referendum on the ballot in November.

Jean Aston, a retired professor of English at the Community College of Allegheny County, wrote Ms. Miller last week to complain about a man gathering signatures beside the Squirrel Hill post office. He was saying “the petition was to prevent the city parks and the city pools from imminent closing,” Ms. Aston wrote.

That’s a crock, of course. The same man told Ms. Aston some days later near the Squirrel Hill Farmers Market that his supervisor had told him to stop claiming that parks might close. So credit the conservancy and its hirelings for correcting that, but this is what can happen when more than a dozen people are flown in from out of town to gather tens of thousands of signatures in the seven- week window ending Aug. 6. ( Conservancy volunteers are helping, too.)

Angelo Paparella, managing partner of BH- AP Petitioning Partners in Los Angeles, said his company has collected 77 million signatures over more than 30 years, but this is its first foray in Pennsylvania. His people are paid by the signature but they’re not campaigning for the issue, he said. Sometimes mistakes are made but the issue is at the top of each petition and the standard line always should be enough: “Your signature simply puts this on the ballot.”

Assuming the conservancy gets the required signatures — and it might take 20,000 signatures to get 12,467 valid ones — we’ll all get to vote on this in November. Maybe by then the conservancy will have made a stronger case. Meanwhile, Pittsburghers have four months to ask questions and think hard about this. I’d suggest doing that during a long walk in one of our parks.