The Truth About Parks and Rec
This municipal department has a hefty budget, a huge backlog of deferred maintenance, and facilities scattered throughout the city. It’s got a large workforce supporting several legacy programs and projects. Yet, it continues to pursue shiny new projects without responsibly budgeting for their upkeep.
The Department of Transportation? No. Parks and Rec. While some of their work is the expected mix of maintaining hiking trails and mowing soccer fields, parks departments are often sprawling agencies responsible for a slew of social programs that affect your city’s youngest and oldest citizens.
Jamie Sabbach has worked in a range of parks department positions, culminating in a superintendent job in the city of Boulder, Colorado, before starting her own parks consulting firm, 110%. Her experience inside and outside municipal governments gives her a unique perspective on how things function (and often dysfunction). Strong Towns asked Sabbach to share some of the misconceptions that newly elected local officials may have about their parks and recreation departments, and how best to engage if they’re passionate about parks.
For elected officials preparing for their first terms, Sabbach starts with some tough love. “I’ve worked with so many city councils in my time that have no idea how systems are managed and operated. Or how they're investing and/or spending taxpayer resources.” So she puts “business acumen” as one of the most important skills for a council member to develop and says that understanding budgets is some of the best homework you can do.
But even there she issues a caveat: “There are a lot of balanced budgets out there with systems that have huge deficits and maintenance backlogs.”
She also calls for cities to become more proactive about training and education. “I think we do a disservice by believing that [new representatives] are fully prepared to assume these jobs and these roles and set policy and make decisions that have huge influence on these communities.”
As with many other aspects of city government, any elected official should be on the lookout for these common pitfalls:
Not budgeting for life cycles. “There's a misconception that simply by building things, that's enough; we just need to find the money to build it. But nobody's talking about operating and maintaining the thing over the next 20 to 30 years. And we know most of the bills (such as HVAC and roof replacement) come due in the second and third decade.”
Pursuing the big shiny. “We should feel guilty building 200,000 square-foot rec centers with beautiful foyers and high ceilings because there's no opportunity for return on investment. We have these same architect firms contracted to do the feasibility studies that are going to tell these agencies, ‘Yeah, you're going to be able to recover all the expenses.’ There's no way they're going to recover expenses” because so much of the space is not dedicated to the core mission. Sabbach compares this to a private fitness club that builds a 42,000-square-foot facility in which 36,000 of the space generates revenue.
Not communicating enough. For a new council member who’s committed to parks, Sabbach says it’s vital to engage with professional staff to learn how the department operates and its budget situation. But it’s also important to respect boundaries, understanding the roles of team members, directors and administrators and how your own role differs. From the department’s perspective, she also urges people working there to engage their city government more proactively. She has heard too many parks officials say they don’t want to “bother” their city council, thus squandering an opportunity to advance their agenda and educate decision-makers.
Caving to vocal minorities. You’re going to face a boisterous hearing with passionate people pushing for the city to build a facility for their niche recreation or favorite amenity [like they had in] the larger city where they used to live. Your job managing a city’s resources is to be a good steward of public finances, not to “subsidize the elite,” Sabbach says. So prepare to “have a really strong spine, not buckle under pressure and say, ‘We are here to do good work for not only you ... this [budget decision] is a legacy exercise'” for the city.
Sabbach’s commitment to fiscal sustainability stems partly from her experience dealing with difficult budget cuts around the 2008 recession.” We were in a community that was highly entitled and affluent, in a government, frankly, that had done a very bad job of managing resources.” So the parks and recreation department had to not only preside over cutbacks but also educate the city council about them. “We weren’t entertaining the idea of building anything or adding anything new to our system. We were looking at service reductions at a time when people's expectations started to accelerate.”
This led Sabbach to two truths that are also core to Strong Towns. “A lot of people don't want to do the math. They're intimidated by it.” But whether it’s the department with the fun facilities everyone loves or the one that fills the potholes, a city’s ability to function hinges on the math. “Because if you can't write the checks, nothing else matters.”
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.