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We Need to Prioritize Our Parks
A perspective from Renuka Soll
(Editor’s note: Renuka Soll is a candidate in this year’s Chapel Hill Town Council election)
Part of what makes Chapel Hill such a special place is its beautiful greenery and parks. Mature trees welcome us, green spaces and trails provide us with mental respite and meeting places, and fields and playgrounds allow our children to connect and play. Our parks and greenways are very well loved and equally heavily used, but over the past decade, they have become shabby and outdated due to lack of proper maintenance.
As a member and Chair of the Chapel Hill Parks, Recreation and Greenways (PRG) Commission for the past five years, I have listened to many of your concerns and thoughtful ideas for how to improve our parks and greenways. I have listened to your needs for more courts, fields, playground equipment, dog parks, and more. Please continue to reach out.
Sadly, many of you likely feel like your needs are not being heard. The Town has responded to very few of them. Why? The town’s queue of parks projects is lamentably long. We currently have ~70 parks and greenway projects, which would roughly cost $25M to address. Ninety percent of these projects have needed funding for over 5 years. Most of these projects are not exciting new additions, like a splashpad or new pickleball facilities; they are basic repairs to keep the facilities and spaces we have safe, accessible, and usable. This means that many of the compelling new ideas residents voice have little hope of getting implemented.
We are in this predicament because our town has systematically deprioritized and starved our parks of funds for more than a decade. The town’s capital expenditure budget, which is the budget used for maintenance and new projects, was less in 2022-2023 than in 2014.
There have been some important changes since 2022-2023. The biggest change came from the Parks Commission successfully advocating for some funds from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) money, one-time federal stimulus money, to be used for our parks. Thanks to this federal infusion, the town was able to returf the Cedar Fall fields, we will be able to start the first phase of a new skate park at Homestead, and we will be able to fund some inclusive playground equipment on existing playgrounds. Thanks to federal funds, we can begin to address three items from that ~70 item list.
Another big change is that after the Parks Staff and Commission brought public attention to our under-funded state, our local government passed “Pennies for Parks,” which starts in 2023-2024. It is estimated to give parks an extra $900,000/year. We are grateful for the extra money, but with $25 million dollars of projects in need on the current list, it will take 25 years to fund them all. And that is without adding more projects to the list that may be needed.
The effect of this continued budget shortfall is that many of our residents have to leave Chapel Hill to recreate. 65% of our pickleball and tennis players report regularly traveling to other communities to find courts. Parents of children who play field sports, like soccer, ultimate and lacrosse, frequently ask me why they have to drive to Durham, Cary, and Raleigh for practices. We hear plenty of rhetoric about Chapel Hill being “a place for everyone,” but we aren’t giving many of our residents public places to recreate.
Let me offer some specific examples. Our town lacks adequate tennis courts. We have a total of 14 public tennis courts for the entire community. Two of these are shared with pickleball and the six at Cedar Falls, are either unplayable (nets removed) or soon to be unplayable. The PRG Commission has spent hours advocating for the Cedar Falls courts to be repaired. Parks staff tried applying for grants. We still don’t have the funds.
1,700 of our fellow townsfolk signed petitions asking for more pickleball courts. We have only six dedicated pickleball courts and a smattering of shared use options. This means not only are many of these avid players leaving Chapel Hill to play, but those that stay are often waiting a long time to get a court.
What is equally lamentable is that the scarcity of courts, which necessitates shared use options, has created discord within our community. The PRG heard over 100 tennis and pickleball players at a Commission meeting heatedly debating whether to share two tennis courts. This shouldn’t happen.
Over 1,000 residents signed a petition to build a splashpad. This is not a new idea; a decade ago the Town’s 2013 Parks Master Plan called for the creation of one. The petition brought it to the forefront. I am hopeful that we can get funding for this project. We need to provide an inexpensive option for children to cool down on hot summer days. However, it is still not funded.
Our neighbors have the political will and are finding funds for parks and greenways. In 2022, Raleigh, Greensboro, and Concord each passed parks bonds for between $60-$275 million. Raleigh is exploring the development of a $70 million pickleball complex, and Cary and Morrisville banded together to lease land adjacent to RDU airport for bike paths.
We can and should find ways to similarly invest in parks before Chapel Hill loses its green character that makes it such a special place. Let’s start prioritizing our parks.
“Viewpoints” on Chapelboro is a recurring series of community-submitted opinion columns. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work or reporting of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.
I would expect a Committee Chair to have a pretty commanding understanding of the local public funding process with five years experience. By what measure are our parks outdated? Are you asking us or trying to convince us?
How much money has been spent on parks and rec on average for, say, the last five years and what would you change that number to? Isn’t it normal for there to be a long range plan for all current and FUTURE capital improvements looking out several years in the future? Isnt keeping tally of that “big number” a good sign that work is already being done to plan appropriately for the long term? Isnt the Penny for Parks an ADDITIONAL funding source, not THEE funding source for the referenced 25 million dollars of intended capital improvements? Aren’t there a host of different local, state, and federal grant sources that went into / go into past and future funding? Don’t bond funds still need to be repaid from some revenue source over the long term? How would that be funded and what would be de-prioritized to do so? Arent some of the largest park facilities in Town actually owned by and managed by Orange County? I get the premise of your editorial but, five years on the job, where is your data set to support your position?
Glen, some of the data you are asking for can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Dq6zqZMvIPNI3fwd6EUCu7Z8VGTv2oqDBlmavLRlVWY/edit#gid=617971290. The numbers in the worksheet are from budget year 2022-2023 year using funds budgeted for Capital Improvement Projects, i.e., funds that could be used for maintenance and new projects. For comparison, the workbook includes data for 11 other NC municipalities. The Commission, together with Parks and Rec staff, also created a presentation to advocate for ARPA funds. It shows funding trends over time and in comparison with other NC municipalities. The slides are here: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1iz8p7WRKZ9VnyRJ0m6isQzml-YGaOls6.
I think the gist of my query is there is a LOT of publicly available information NOT present in the editorial or the linked docs that make the writer’s case much less definitive. Seems like a conflict of interest to site one’s position as a committee chair “in the loop” but cherry pick the public record to make a case statement aligned with a platform position as a candidate.
Glen, The data set rests within the town’s budget for 2022-2023. Over the past 5 years, the P&R operating budget has declined between 1-2%; the number of staff has stayed steady after losing 4 positions in 2019. It’s hard to get more specific because P&R contains cemetery beautification and maintenance and a lot of other landscaping not directly related to parks or recreation. The CIP for parks has been a steady $170K ($20K for cemetery). In the face of a $25M deferred maintenance shortfall, the newly adopted Pennies for Parks and ARPA investment (one-time) will help offset any further funding deficit but they won’t go far toward the funding of all the newly planned projects like the splash pad, skateboard park renovations, etc. They won’t create any new parks and won’t fully fund the accessible playground. Supposedly all the new development over the past several years was going to bring in more funding for town operations. I don’t know if that’s happening, but if so, it’s not being invested in parks or recreation.
I’d rather see a robust discussion about all the trade offs inherent in the the entire Capital Needs budget for the entire Town for, say, the next five years or so…especially in a post-covid world. How much to spend, on what, paid for by whom…the tough questions of governing. Using covid-year numbers from one small/incomplete slice of funding and then one or two post-covid years skewed by Relief Funds that have to be used in certain technical categories and can not be used in others (and that will expire if they are not used) as “evidence” of the Council’s priorities is disingenuous, especially from anyone that has been part of all the recent work to manage the multiple dimensions of the budget. There is no real clarity or context in the limited slice of information being used here as a campaign plank. Feels more like a play to folks who dont know much about the public process but have been focused on the Legion Rd property. No one on Council is “anti-park”. I’d pose my own question here: is relitigating the current plan to use of the Legion Rd property to include park space AND affordable housing going to speed up access to park space or is it actually going to slow down the development of that new park to satisfy the political agenda of stopping the housing? Can the candidate clarify if they do or dont support moving forward with the Legion Rd park as currently planned? THAT would be an interesting and more explicit bit of knowledge for public consumption.
The Local Reporter posed this very question about the Legion Rd. property to all the candidates. Renuka’s answer, and those of the the other candidates, can be found here: https://thelocalreporter.press/questions-and-answers-from-chapel-hill-municipal-candidates-in-the-2023-election/. It’s question #4.