Parks planning gets serious

Oh, plans! The city of Santa Fe loves to have plans. Most recently released, a 10-year master plan describing how best to meet the needs of the city’s Parks and Recreation Department. The Parks, Open Space, Trails and Recreation Master Plan is a blueprint forward, and should be most appreciated by the city’s next mayor. Without plans, it is too easy to become mired in individual situations without ever looking at the big picture.

For city parks, unfortunately, demand has moved south much faster than actual parks have been built. The report shows that more than half of the residents in City Council Districts 1, 2 and 4 live within a half-mile of a park. In District 3, which thousands of children and families call home, only 15 percent of residents are that close to parks. That is unfair.

City priorities, then, should focus on preserving what exists while, at the same time, putting more parks where people are. That could mean a hard look at resources, with some consolidation of parks in older parts of town to free up resources for areas with the greatest number of children. We don’t necessarily need more parks. We need parks in the right places.

Here’s proof from the report: Santa Fe has 13.2 acres of park land per 1,000 residents, compared to 9.1 acres per 1,000 acres on the national average. That’s a statistic of which to be proud. However, that many parks to maintain can make it hard on workers. Perhaps parks no longer needed for recreation can be used for apartments or houses; another planning process happening at the city is identifying property that could be used to help improve the stock of affordable housing.

The city, too, should look for ways to work with other governments. How about a city-county park, with both sides pitching in for maintenance? Then there are Santa Fe Public Schools — can recreational fields or playground equipment ever be shared? Funds all come from the same taxpayers, after all. Obviously, with heightened security at schools, playgrounds cannot be accessible during school hours. Surely, there are ways to share playing fields, for example, so that taxpayers can avoid paying for the same amenities twice.

The report looks at issues of staffing, too, with recommendations for more specialists in such areas as turf and water. That’s smart. Reducing maintenance-heavy features makes sense, as well. There are ideas to require event organizers — people who rent park space or lease the Plaza, for example — to hire their own, third-party cleanup crews. That would relieve city staff and make it possible for staffers to go about their regular jobs.

Other recommendations (some we have made ourselves) including involving more volunteers for park maintenance — imagine if, at the least, the larger city parks had their own Railyard Park Stewards helping out. Department employees, after all, are responsible for caring for the city’s 70-plus parks, city medians, public grounds at libraries, hundreds of acres of open space and helping at city-run events. That’s a lot of ground to cover.

A short aside about staffing. According to the report, there are about 18.2 full-time equivalent staff members per 10,000 residents in the parks and recreation department. That compares to 7.3 full-time equivalent staff per 10,000 on a national level. That seems to indicate Santa Fe has too many, not too few, workers. Before the outrage starts, consider this. This is not parks staffing only; this is parks and recreation, which includes workers at the Genoveva Chavez Community Center and other recreational spots in our city. Most cities do not run the sorts of recreational facilities that Santa Fe does. Many have fewer parks, too. Such statistics need closer examination for a better comparison of how our parks staffing stacks up.

This is just a draft report, however, so there is plenty of time for discussion and tweaking. Done by planning consultant Sites Southwest for a price of $105,000, the master plan will now receive further consideration by city officials and residents (meetings were held last summer for residents to give preliminary comments). At 5:30 p.m. Feb. 20, more comments will be taken at the Parks and Recreation Advisory Commission meeting, held at the Chavez Center. Eventually, the City Council will consider and adopt the plan.

A plan is only as good as any action that follows — and this time, let’s work toward actions that will better care for parks we have while bringing more parks to south Santa Fe.