Becky’s Priorities for the 2024 Park Board Budget

This year, commissioners had the opportunity to put forth three budget priorities. You can view my priorities and the priorities of other commissioners here. My budget priorities reflect items that residents have told me are important, are implementable in the short term, and are tangible. I absolutely support other priorities as well, such as continuing free programming for youth and implementing natural areas management. 

Here are my top three budget priorities:

Priority #1: Shade Structures

I support a bulk purchase and installation of approximately 20 low cost ($15,000) shade structures using park dedication fees across Minneapolis. I envision this as a line item in the 2024 Capital Improvement Program (CIP) called Shade Structure Program for $300,000. 

Lack of shade is a problem I’ve heard about from many residents and is an issue as we experience increasingly extreme summer temperatures. I see many benefits to this incremental approach. First, most neighborhood parks have sufficient funds for these smaller purchases from within individual neighborhood park dedication fee accounts, allowing for geographic equity across Minneapolis. Second, this approach aligns with climate resiliency efforts. Third, using a bulk purchase rather than a park-by-park approach should reduce costs and be more efficient to manage. Last, it helps the Park Board care for all Minneapolis residents by making incremental, geographically dispersed improvements, rather than making major capital improvements to local parks only once every 15 or so years. 

Staff Response: Gaining economies of scale through a coordinated purchase and installation of shade structures could be orchestrated through a “shade structure program.” Staff could assess various funding strategies, including the use of available parkland dedication dollars, and seek play features (waterplay features or playgrounds) where additional shade would benefit health of children. We might also look to align a purchase through grants that would allow installations in neighborhoods beyond those having available parkland dedication funds, bringing greater equity to the program.

Priority #2: Phillips Aquatic Center

In 2022, Phillips Aquatic Center (PAC) was open 7 days per week as opposed to 6 days per week in Spring 2023, closing on Sundays. Sundays used to have women-only swim times and family swim. My priority for the 2024 budget is that PAC has seven (7) days per week hours of operation. It is so important that this multi‐million dollar capital investment is open and available for use to maximum capacity.

Staff Response: This can be done. In 2023 we are having capacity issues with multiple FT guard positions unfilled. Once they are hired we can continue with seven day operations at PAC.

All activities within the "enterprise fund", which includes parking, are expected to be self-supporting. Parking, the orange line, consistently brings in more than $1,000,000 in annual revenue to the Minneapolis park system.

Priority #3: Parking Policy/Pricing Evaluation

The Park Board manages hundreds of parking spaces with a variety of paid and unpaid spaces and permitting types across regional and local parks. Parking revenue is a consistent generator of more than one million dollars annually and is an important non-property tax source of park revenue. One staff person oversees parking, yet this position has been vacant for the last year. 

Recognizing the value that parking revenue brings to the park system, I would like to see the Park Board analyze its parking policy and pricing with support from a Metropolitan Council regional solicitation grant. The grant pays 80% of total project costs, and will enable best parking management practices. (This is not about changing the amount of parking.) The 20% local match requirement could be paid for with savings from having the parking position vacant for so long. 

Staff Response: Staff are reviewing to determine a possible project scope and match source. Staff would seek grant writing assistance via a professional services contract, if we proceed with this request.

Why I support the Open Parkways pilot project (described in next section)

Here are some reasons that I support the concept of open parkways:

Safety:
After guns, the number one cause of death for children is traffic crashes. As the mom to two kids ages five and eight, I worry about their physical safety a lot when we are traveling around Minneapolis. The news of two traffic deaths this past week in Chicago to children scooting and biking hit especially close to home. I know that other people, like myself, are concerned about issues of extreme speeding on our roadways and the harm from increasingly larger, taller, and heavier vehicles.

We know that separated bikeways and walkways save lives. We also know that current paths for people walking and rolling are inadequate in their current form, either because of maintenance, design, or that demand is simply higher than capacity on beautiful summer weekends.

Financial:
Trying out the open parkways toolkit this summer also makes sense from a financial perspective. Our parkways host numerous events and being able to more nimbly close parkways to vehicular traffic is smart investment even if it was only just for the type and quantity of events we held in 2019 and beforehand. Right now the expense for all the barricades and cones needed for those events is charged to the event sponsors. By installing gates/permanent infrastructure, MPRB could continue charging event sponsors the same amount that would have otherwise gone to those rentals, but put that money back into the park system rather than out to a suburban sign rental company. (Or MPRB could reduce fees for organizations that wouldn’t be able to afford the price of traditional barricades.) Events include the Twin Cities Marathon, 4th of July, and Aquatennial, to name a few.

Joy:
I believe that all members of our city deserve clean air, public spaces where they can walk, bike, and roll freely and hear the birds chirp. By supporting opportunities to rethink our parkways and try out new uses, I believe that we can enhance quality of life for people in Minneapolis. All residents of Minneapolis deserve to live free from particulate pollution from cars, and excessive traffic noise.

People have written me about the calming nature of our parkways, how relaxing it is to drive on them in comparison with our other roadways. One person even remarked to me how she liked seeing the eagles from her car. We need more roads, especially our MnDOT and County roads to spark that same amount of joy. The burden of joyful roads cannot alone be borne by our parkways, particularly since the Park Board only receives $750,000 per year for their maintenance.

Access:
I know that some people are concerned about open parkways removing access to certain groups of people. On the contrary, creating small opportunities to remove car traffic from stretches of parkway expands park access for people who may not have been comfortable walking or rolling on the parkways before, particularly to kids and people using mobility devices. To understand what works well and what doesn't for a Minneapolis concept we need to measure:

• Who uses the open parkways (demographics)

• Who is not using the parkways in their current form, whether driving, walking, or rolling

• Satisfaction levels with open parkways

• Change in travel behavior and recreation levels attributed to open parkways

From the Bureau of Transportation Statistics:

• "Regardless of age, people with disabilities travel by personal vehicles—as drivers or as passengers—for a smaller share of trips than people without disabilities."

• "People age 18 to 64 with disabilities are less likely to own or have access to vehicles than people without disabilities."

• "Workers age 18 to 64 with disabilities walk for a slightly greater share of trips than workers without disabilities (14.6 v. 13.0 percent). This finding may seem counterintuitive. One possible explanation is that workers with disabilities are more likely to live in zero-vehicle households than workers without disabilities (12.2 v. 3.9 percent)."