Park Advocates Demand Public Review Period for San Diego’s New Parks Master Plan

Parks and Recreation Coalition (PARC) was notified yesterday by city officials that a new Parks Master Plan would be released on June 2 with an aggressive schedule without sufficient time for public review of hundreds of pages of text and analysis impacting more than a billion dollars in future park fees.

PARC includes former city planners, landscape architects, architects, and community planners who reviewed the initial draft and helped defeat it last November at City Council.  The initial plan laid out arbitrary standards that would not provide the parks needed by a growing population and without an understandable park land standard.

The new draft, being released without a strike-out, underline version to aid public review, is not addressing the key problem identified by PARC last November — the promotion of a confusing and untested “points” system to replace the easily understandable land standard in use today.

“Without an understandable land standard for new parks, there is no way to tell which communities will get additional parks or where new parks might go to serve an additional 325,000 people being added during the life of the Plan.” stated Susan Baldwin, co-chair of PARC.

“I don’t understand why Mayor Gloria is touting what is essentially Mayor Faulconer’s approach to parks planning that prioritizes development interests over the need for new public parks.” said Carolyn Chase, co-chair of PARC and a former City Planning Commissioner.

More time is needed to get input from Community Planning Groups, Community Recreation Groups, sports leaders, professional associations, and others. PARC strongly believes it would be unwise to rush the plan and not get needed support from the communities and other civic leaders.

Contacts:
Susan Baldwin, Co-Chair
susanbaldwin@aol.com  619-867-5028
Carolyn Chase, Co-Chair
planning@icontactweb.com  858-405-0710

For background, see this.