Complete Text of a Letter From the Park Advisory Board
Dear Editor;
During the late 1800’s the American parks and recreation movement was born in two disparate places: the vast wilderness of the West, and the industrial cities of the East. Frederick Law Olmstead, Joseph Lee, and John Muir were pioneers.
Olmstead and his colleagues created Central Park in New York City in 1850 and the ‘local public park’ was born. The idea was uniquely American, totally new, and it spread across the world like wildfire. Olmstead held that all Americans had a right to pleasant public place for leisure.
Around the same time Joseph Lee established local public playgrounds in Boston. Lee felt that children deserved a place to play. Lee emphasized children’s rights to space, light and air.
In 1890, John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt set aside 148 million acres of forest and park land including Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks. Muir proposed that natural areas had recreational value.
It is easy to forget these notions because they are well accepted today. But, they were key new ideas of a movement that began little more than 100 years ago! In their era, the movement founders were considered radicals, but now parks and recreation is so prevalent it is sometimes taken for granted.
We need to ask ourselves if the parks and recreation movement is alive and well today. Do we still believe, as Olmstead, Lee and Muir did: that public parks are important; that children grow best at play; and that humans can benefit recreation? Do we still believe that everyone has these rights?
This is the reason for posing this question: there are three serious problems in the parks and recreation movement in East Jefferson County: (1) there are not enough active recreation facilities such as basketball gymnasiums, fitness centers, tennis courts, athletic fields, aquatics centers, playgrounds, or multiple-purpose trails; (2) the facilities we have suffer from design or deferred maintenance problems; (3) operating costs (staff, fuel, construction-materials, and health care) are up, but revenue is down.
These four problems are ubiquitous to our local institutions: the City Port Townsend, the Schools, Jefferson County, and the non-profit suffer alike.
County Parks & Rec is the only ‘un-mandated service’ paid for by the ‘general fund’ of the County Budget. When sales tax revenues collected by the County dip, County Parks & Rec is the first to get cut. This year tax revenues from sales tax are dropping due to a decrease in residential construction, and a total of $58,600 will be cut from the 2008 County Parks Rec budget request. $39,000 of the cut funds were ‘local match money’ for a $216,000 Washington State Grant for a construction project valued at $620,000 at H.J. Carroll Park. This $39,000 is a ‘one-time’ cut.
The remaining $19,600 is from wages and benefits for staff, and will result in a reduction of services in 2008. Current trends indicate that County Parks & Rec funding will be further reduced each year for the foreseeable future.
The County Parks and Rec Advisory Board had a retreat in October and vowed to manage the situation responsibly by applying the following strategies: (1) protect programs and facilities that can offset part of their costs through fees; (2) try to keep parks and services that benefit children and their families; (3) spread cuts geographically so no specific community is unfairly impacted; (4) work closely with our partners; (5) lead a regional initiative to find a long term solution.
Using these guidelines, the County Parks Advisory Board makes the following initial recommendations for service cuts in 2008: (1) due to the loss of $39,000 in local match funds -return the $216,000 grant to the State of Washington and cancel the $630,000 park improvement project at H.J. Carroll Park; (2) stop mowing the grass at the Courthouse Park and the Indian Island Parks; (3) and ask the Chimacum and Port Townsend School Districts to paint the field lines and clean up the trash at Memorial Field for their own games.
Barring improvements in funding and governance for 2009, the County Parks & Rec Advisory Board will recommend that available resources be expended to keep a limited number of high quality facilities open and begin surplus the remainder. Memorial Field will be first to close because it is a low quality facility that is expensive to operate.
To lead a regional initiative to find a long term solution the County Parks and Rec Advisory Board will: (1) listen and learn through a series of public forums to be held in 2009; (2) provide volunteer and professional staff resources for organization and support; (3) make recommendations directly to the people through editorials such as this; (4) make recommendations to policy makers through formal channels.
Sincerely Yours
The Jefferson County Parks and Recreation Advisory Board
(The Advisory Board has been in continuous service since 1989, and consists of nine appointed members, three from each County Commissioners District. District One: More information is available on our website: www.countyrec.com)
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