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How to use public participation to design and fund a community’s dream park
With the rise in remote work, digital nomads are relocating and prioritizing places that offer great amenities — particularly, desirable parks and recreation.
The National Community Survey by Polco, an assessment that measures resident opinions about their cities, confirms that parks and walking trails are a top priority. No matter how many outdoor activities a city offers, residents want more, a preference that even holds true in communities already excelling in providing abundant green space and walking trails. This raises the stakes for local governments to stay attuned to what residents want from their park and recreation departments, as well as their willingness to pay for those amenities.
Rethinking Public Engagement
Some cities are going beyond the typical public meeting process to gather input using new digital tools, including interactive online simulations (sometimes called scenario planning). More cities are finding that the public wants to provide input on tax increases, service reductions and priorities — including for their park and recreation services. For park and recreation leaders, public engagement skills are becoming an increasingly important competency.
Public meetings are the status quo of local government public engagement but are proving inadequate for modern community engagement requirements. They’re typically poorly attended or serve to inflate the concerns of a few individuals rather than provide balanced and inclusive community input.
High-quality, valid surveying techniques ensure everyone’s voices are heard, whether they participate in online or face-to-face public engagement activities. Surveys are especially useful at the beginning of the process when trying to understand satisfaction. In addition, surveys produce benchmarking data so cities and towns can compare themselves to their peers.
But while surveys can show overall priorities, they don’t educate or account for the costs of providing services, which is why some communities also are leveraging interactive online simulation tools accessible to anyone with a connected digital device. The tools provide stakeholders with graphic-rich interactive pages to gather input quickly and easily on a variety of questions, such as priorities and a willingness to pay for certain amenities and services.
Simulation-based public engagement tools also are an instructive and constructive way to test scenarios, whether designing a new park within a constrained budget or determining what residents are willing to pay through a ballot initiative. These efforts help establish two-way communication with residents and increase transparency and problem-solving as a community. Here are two examples of communities using simulation-based public engagement to determine priorities for park and recreation amenities — and the willingness of residents to pay for them.
Saint Paul Residents Design a Dream Park
When it comes to planning for its future parks, Saint Paul, Minnesota — the number two park system in the nation, according to the Trust for Public Land’s ParkScore® index — keeps reaching for the highest monkey bar. Residents love their local parks, and demand and use are high, putting pressure on the park and recreation department to stay in lockstep with the diverse and growing local population’s expectations.
Saint Paul regularly seeks creative and inclusive ways to engage its residents in planning “a city that works for all of us,” as Mayor Melvin Carter is known to say. After success using simulation-based public engagement tools to gather input on community sentiment and priorities during its annual budget process, the city’s park and recreation department tapped into the same technology in 2022 to create a Design A Park “game.”
Using a customizable online engagement tool, the department’s user-friendly, interactive online simulation enabled residents to design a new (hypothetical) park with a $1 million budget. The data generated from the tool is helping to shape Saint Paul’s next Parks and Recreation System Plan, which serves as a comprehensive guide to physical improvements and modifications to parks, athletic fields, recreation centers, trails and other facilities.
To create their park plans, residents visited the interactive online simulation displaying 33 tiles featuring amenities ranging from a $1,500 bike rack to an $800,000 splash pad. With each selected tile, which included an image and associated dollar amount, a bar across the top tracked the total spent until it reached $1 million. Users could build their park with components from five different categories:
- Utility (park benches, picnic tables, drinking fountains, etc.)
- Activities (batting cages, skate parks, ski trails, dog parks, etc.)
- Courts and fields (outdoor tracks, beach volleyball courts, solo pickleball courts, etc.)
- Decorative (community gardens, public art, water features)
- Aquatics (splash pads)
After making selections within the budget limit, residents then could rank their choices and submit their park design to the city. The tool also provided a place for comments.
The process provided a two-way exchange. Participants learned about the relative (estimated) costs of a park bench versus a splash pad and how far they could stretch their park’s $1 million budget. One goal of the exercise was to reach people who might not participate in standard community engagement activities, such as public meetings or surveys. Utilizing the tool’s tile designs, the game was more accessible for people from a range of ages and language backgrounds, as well as those with limited technology capabilities or time.
To complement the Design A Park interactive tool, the park department created an online “Draw the Future” webpage for its youngest residents to draw their ideal park and features. Submissions included swing sets, ziplines, pools — even a petting zoo.
Garnering 1,384 page views, 405 submissions and a 30 percent submission rate, the Design A Park initiative educated the park and recreation department on what is trending for amenities. While the results weren’t technically attached to a tangible budget, the data will be used to identify service gaps and justify future budget decisions.
Kirkland Uses Simulations to Aide Park Funding
The City of Kirkland, Washington, consistently ranks as one of the best places to live in the state. Its parks are among the top amenities that attract more than 90,000 residents.
In recent years, the city heard from more than 4,700 community members who shared a desire for more facilities and recreational opportunities. The Kirkland City Council is exploring an accelerated timeline to deliver increased services and amenities, which would require placing a ballot measure to increase property taxes in front of voters in 2023. In Washington, which doesn’t have a state income tax, it is typical for local governments to ask their communities for property tax measures to generate more funding for schools, fire protection, parks and other services.
Kirkland previously used an interactive online simulation tool for public engagement on its annual budget. The city offered a similar option for a Parks Funding Exploratory Committee (PFEC), formed in September 2022, to make recommendations for future park and recreation offerings and a ballot initiative to pay for them.
The city tasked the 45 diverse PFEC community members to thoughtfully consider some of the toughest questions about community park and recreation needs and how to pay for them.
PFEC discussions focused on options for indoor aquatics, recreation, community facilities, and other important park amenities and programs. Three key questions guided months of collaboration:
- What should the community buy?
- How should it be funded?
- Did they think it would pass?
To help weigh the tough choices, the committee used a prioritization tool. It displayed 22 possible amenities, ranging from an aquatics and recreation center to increased lifeguarding at beaches and enhanced recreation programs for youth and teens, all within a fixed budget.
Members could use the tool to select and rank their choices, staying within a budget that represented the approximate annual cost for a resident’s $1 million valued home. They also could leave comments. A set of printed flashcards with additional details on each amenity complemented the online tool.
An overarching goal of the committee was to include something for everyone. After running the simulation three times, the committee did a ranking during an in-person meeting by placing dots on amenities listed around the room. Members then asked if they could use the prioritization tool “one more time,” settling on an iteration that used a budget of $260 a year for a resident’s $1 million valued home.
The online simulation provided flexibility to the group and worked well for testing different funding scenarios. The simulation also allowed committee members to provide input outside of meetings on their own time. The response rate was higher than 90 percent.
By using the tool to test different iterations across several meetings, the committee thoughtfully narrowed down its options, settled on a modified option for more public restrooms, and overwhelmingly agreed to recommend a ballot measure. The approximate cost of the recommendation ranged from $195 to $272 per year on the $1 million valued home.
Next, the city planned to conduct a statistically valid survey within the community to gauge support for the recommended amenities and willingness to pay. Those results would then be shared back to PFEC for final ballot recommendations before going to the council for a vote in July 2023.
Technology Enhances Community Engagement
The confluence of technological advances and community desire for input into government processes is sparking demand for modernized public engagement. With user-friendly online simulation tools, cities can educate residents while also gathering their input. These fact-based conversations enable local leaders to make informed park and recreation plans that achieve the community’s goals and provide “something for everyone.”
Chris Adams is President of Balancing Act by Polco. Liz Carey-Linskey is Public Information Specialist at City of Saint Paul Parks and Recreation. Hillary De La Cruz is Management Analyst at City of Kirkland Parks and Community Services.