It’s a problem faced by park and recreation agencies across the country: New parks and facilities are added each year with unpredictable effects on the long-term, system-wide maintenance budget. This can lead to problems in maintaining consistent quality standards across a park system, especially in the absence of standardized park assessment measures.

“The history of our district, very similar to others, is that you pick up two or three parks a year, you add a playground or two, but maintenance isn’t included,” says Kevin Finnegan, director of parks at the Naperville Park District near Chicago, Illinois. “So that’s where we were, too. You find yourself being so heavily task-oriented on a day-to-day basis that you have no plan to follow, that you have no future vision on where you want your parks to be….It all becomes garbage, litter, and bathrooms, right?”

Thanks in part to his MBA background, Finnegan began to look at the problem a little differently.

“I have always believed that in the public sector you can apply real business solutions to issues,” Finnegan says. “Where is the biggest hit here? Where are we, and where do we want to be? We did have a maintenance plan in place, but we had no means to measure how successful we were or how difficult it was to meet the expectations.”

Naperville is a city of 141,800 residents with 140 parks that the park department localizes into three divisions: north, central, and south. Those parks get heavy use from 650 teams playing more than 12,000 games annually. Maintaining service standards across the three divisions became a high priority, especially after a survey in 2008 revealed only 39 parks were meeting all of the maintenance service standards. But was it a matter of people, process, or resources?

People
Naperville instituted a number of no-cost and low-cost strategies to keep park maintenance running as efficiently as possible. One no-cost technique was to assign ownership of various maintenance tasks at each park to particular staff. For example, one staff person is now responsible for shrub beds, one or two staff members handle the turf, and another cares for the landscape beds at a series of parks. A single person can be given credit or held accountable for conditions at their parks. A standardized inspection process implemented through a three-day training program means that all parks are assessed for conditions (such as the percent of broadleaf coverage) in the same way.

“We found the very first year that, with that ownership, we improved five to eight percent in our productivity without any additional monies,” Finnegan says. “Then, through the improved inspection process...we were all on the same playing field. Everybody was looking at everything the same way. Then we got up to 48 or 49 parks that met every maintenance standard.”

Process
With the standardized inspection protocol and staff ownership in place, Finnegan and his staff could start assigning dollar figures to various maintenance tasks.

“We worked very hard on the turf side, which is probably the biggest challenge of many park districts because of the athletic component,” Finnegan recalls. “We figured out what that cost was per acre to apply fertilizer per year, depending on the intensity of play, and to implement our broadleaf standard, which is no more than five percent coverage on the field.”

When parks weren’t meeting the standards, the department could now calculate the total cost to bring the parks up to that level, while also taking into account contracts for long-term maintenance tasks, such as tree pruning every seven years.

A year later, staff were ready to present Naperville’s “Mode Matrix” to the parks board. Finnegan and his staff spent six months just on developing the spreadsheet that can be used to calculate virtually every maintenance expense for every park.

First, the city’s 140 parks were assigned to six classifications—Mode I is for Naperville’s high-profile Riverwalk, Mode II parks include heavily used sports complexes, Mode III encompasses neighborhood parks with sports elements, Mode IV is for neighborhood parks that may have some open turf, Mode V areas are greenways and more natural areas, and Mode VI is for undeveloped parcels. For each mode, the spreadsheet spells out exactly how much it will cost to mow and fertilize the grass, care for shrubs and trees, and maintain the site facilities. The costs listed are those needed to meet the service standards for that level of park.

Thanks to the detailed specifications in the Mode Matrix and maintenance plan, the maintenance staff’s daily workflow can be planned ahead. Employees come in with their tasks already scheduled 75 to 80 percent of the time, according to Finnegan, eliminating waiting around in the morning for work orders.

“Pretty much every one of our regular staff employees—our full-timers—don’t have to come see the boss every day,” he explains. “They already know what their expectations are, and that helps, because then they are able to properly plan.”

In addition, six GPS units help track mowing cycles and calculate travel time versus how much time is used at the parks themselves. It has allowed the Naperville Park District to compare themselves to contract mowers in determining what jobs to contract out and even enabled the department to reduce the mowing cycle at peak growing season from six to five days. Finally, a tree inventory system with a color-coded mapping function has allowed the department to get a better handle on scheduling landscape tree maintenance, locating and removing stumps, and prioritizing potentially hazardous situations.

Resources
Before having the maintenance plan and Mode Matrix, Naperville’s requests to the parks board were more ad hoc than strategic.

“People would just say, ‘Well, I need more help and I need more supplies,’ and after you complain enough, they go, ‘Okay, we’ll give you one person,’” Finnegan says. “That’s what happened over the years, but they never really knew what that one person was doing—it just kind of got absorbed in the bigger picture.”

Armed with data about how many parks did not meet the service standards and exactly how much it would cost to bring them up to standard, Finnegan saw increasing success in securing more strategic maintenance funding from the parks board. Now the park system is on a three-year operating plan, and all new capital projects, such as for the park district’s new Nike Park sports complex, include an operating component. Finnegan credits the NRPA Maintenance Management School for providing the model that, in combination with the Mode Matrix, formed the basis for future budget projections.

“Just like anything else, when you go in and try to sell a story, they come back and say, ‘Well, okay, we’re going to give you some of it, and then you show us what you can do,’” Finnegan says. “It was the first time the board was ever made aware of actually where we were in the maintenance plan and what we needed to move forward....With the successes that we showed from budget year to budget year, now it’s entrenched in our process that when we add an element like a new sports complex, we build the budget model and it’s approved….The board fully understands when they approve something, they are also approving the operating side.”

Residents have noticed the improving park conditions, and Finnegan is pleased with the progress made under the new system.

“I’m happy to say that through four years of this process of improving, as of the other day, we are at 138 out of 140 parks that are at standard now.

“While it may appear complex and difficult, it’s really not,” he continues. “You don’t have to have an automated work-order system to make this happen. You can simply do this using an Excel spreadsheet and using your paper work-order flow. It can work just as long as you’re committed to making it happen. This model can also be used in reverse—if you’re challenged in your community by a declining tax base and revenue, you just go in the reverse direction. Which elements now do we need to defer, and which elements do we need to prolong? The key is have the plan in place first—develop your maintenance plan to how you want the division to look, and compare it back to what your resources are. You assess the gap and see what you need to get there.”

Note: Samples of Naperville’s spreadsheets are available at the 2012 Congress Resource Center Library on NRPA Connect.

Elizabeth Beard is Managing Editor of Parks & Recreation.