DENVER — The City of Denver unveiled a five-year plan to improve and expand the city's many parks with the end goal being "everyone within a 10-minute walk of a park."
Mayor Michael Hancock, City Council President Jolon Clark and Parks & Rec Director Happy Haynes were all in attendance at the unveiling of a five-year plan for the city's parks.
The money raised, which is expected to number in the tens of millions of dollars each year, will be put to the following:
- Acquiring additional land for parks, trails and open space
- Improving and maintaining existing parks, trails and open space, including Denver Mountain Parks
- Building and maintaining new parks and trails
- Restoring and protecting natural features such as waterways, rivers, canals, and streams
- Expanding the urban tree cover in parks, parkways, and public right-of-ways
More shade, more space and more parks is the name of the game, according to city leaders.
The new tax — added in when voters approved Measure 2A in November — is called the "Parks and Open Space Sales Tax" and is a 0.25% tax, meaning an additional 25-cent tax on every $10 spent.
The five-year plan, which can be viewed at this link, will be paid for by both the tax and existing city funds. It is a part of Parks and Recreation's "Game Plan for a Healthy City," which is the city's master plan for parks, facilities and programs.
The tax is expected to bring in an additional $37 million in revenue.
A public hearing is set for Thursday, May 30, during the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board meeting.
The five-year plan provided at an 11:30 press conference from the city is 30 pages long and focuses on the beautification and greening of our city as having pushing Denverites to one thing: bodily health.
But that's not all the plan hopes to accomplish.
"Equity is the driving principle guiding plans for investment of 2A funds... building a healthy city includes expanding access for all to the outdoors, adapting to climate change, enhancing biodiversity and improving stewardship of our resources," the plan says in its introduction.
New projections undertaken by the parks department will have to meet a set of criteria from things like "equity," and "sustainability" to "safety" and "geographic distribution." In a nutshell, the parks department wants to spread out its parks, keep them accessible by everyone, keep them safe, partner with other groups for resources and make sure they provide for older adults and kids.
According to the five-year plan, the new sales tax with also help with the $130 million backlogs of maintenance projects for the city's parks.
The portion of the plan that goes into detail about what the parks department intends to do begins around page 13. It includes several interesting tidbits, like how the parks department intends to evenly provide parks to richer and poorer areas of the city and how it may consider buying some mountain land to increase the number of mountain parks the city owns.
To read the plan, head to this link.
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