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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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In Our View: How Vital Are City’s Parks?

The Columbian
Published:

For the city of Vancouver, the dilemma is flowering like a rhododendron in spring.

Vancouver has 83 city parks, which long have served to enhance and beautify neighborhoods in every nook of the region. While Esther Short Park might serve as the city’s front porch, laying out a welcome mat for visitors from near and far, neighborhood parks can perform the same function on a more intimate scale.

So it is that the depressing condition of Vancouver’s parks points out a hardship facing governments these days. As detailed in a recent Columbian article by Amy Fischer: “It’s been five years since the city slashed its maintenance staff in half as part of Great Recession budget cuts to preserve police and fire services. With just 15 workers left to care for the city’s 83 parks — not to mention hundreds of acres of other city property that includes cemeteries, trails and medians — irrigation systems were shut down. Plants and trees died off. Shrubs withered and weeds grew.” And that doesn’t even get into the dilapidated picnic tables and cracked concrete.

In other words, Vancouver’s parks are not reflective of the region’s traditional embrace of lush greenery and landscaping, and many residents are beginning to request that attention be given to the situation. “I recognize that the community and the city council would like our parks to look better. We all would,” City Manager Eric Holmes said. “It’s a tough issue. . . . It’s a matter of how do we get there, and we’re working on that.”

How, indeed? Identifying a problem typically is easier than solving it. For the 2015-16 budget cycle, 6 percent of the city’s $302 million budget is earmarked for parks and recreation, and there are other pressing items on the wish list — particularly roads. Vancouver’s transportation improvement plan, for example, contains $250 million in unfunded projects.

While it is difficult to get past the idea that unfettered natural beauty is one of the hallmarks of Vancouver and the surrounding area, the issue of parks comes down to a matter of priorities. In 2012, city officials placed a measure on the ballot for a property tax levy to create a dedicated funding stream for parks and recreation; 66 percent of voters rejected it. Certainly, the economy has improved in the past three years, but any ballot measure to raise taxes likely would leave city officials feeling like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill.

Which brings us back to the dilemma of trying to find money for parks in this tax-averse age. Convincing the populace that every city dollar is being well-spent and that more dollars are necessary is a difficult sell. Police and fire protection — which combine for 51 percent of the city’s expenditures — should remain at the top of the priority list, but beyond that, the city’s leaders will have to balance parks against the many other amenities it provides.

(As an aside, the issue is more complicated than simply having citizens help with park upkeep. In 2001, when volunteers planted petunias in Esther Short Park, members of Teamsters Union Local 58 complained that the job should have been given to them. They ended up being paid overtime wages for the hours they spent not planting the flowers).

Parks, in many ways, are a quality-of-life issue, a reflection of how a citizenry wants to present its city to the outside world. And there is little doubt they have value in providing recreation and enhancing the natural surroundings. We hope that Vancouver’s leaders can find a way to bolster the city’s parks, but taxpayers thus far have not indicated that those parks should be a priority.

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