Mary Barry
Director of Parks, Recreation, & Cultural Resources
Town of Cary
Speaking on October 29, 1998, about the $10 million parks portion of the February 2, 1999 Bond Referendum.
GENERAL PARKS DEVELOPMENT & SUPPORT
"I’m going to talk a little bit about the proposal for parks and greenways development. The proposed amount is $10 million, and the purpose of that is to support the projects found within the Parks, Greenways and Bikeways Master Plan. This plan was adopted by the Town Council this summer. It is part of the planning process and documents for other areas within the Town. It fits into the land management plan, and it fits into the transportation plan for the greenways and bikeways."
"Clearly, whenever we develop a plan, the first thing we need to establish is our vision of the future. With the parks, greenways, and bikeways plan, we met with a lot of citizens and had much public input to tell us what that vision should be."
"First of all, our vision continues to focus on convenient and affordable access to a balanced, diverse and comprehensive system of recreation resources and facilities, to improve our quality of life, to provide access to both active and passive recreation opportunities, to protect our natural and valuable resources, and finally, to foster cooperation and partnerships throughout our community."
"Now, once we develop this we have to look at several factors to tell us how we we’re going to make our recommendation for the master plan based on basically four criteria. The first thing was to look at the inventory of our public and private facilities that are existing today. We needed to know what our state of affairs are at this point before we move it to where we need it to go. We looked at the public facilities; we could not just look at Town facilities. We looked at school facilities which are a great contribution to our recreation system and also to Wake County parks in our area and other adjacent municipalities. For our private facilities, we are primarily concentrating on those things that the developers often provide for their homeowner’s associations that are built up-front primarily as a marketing tool for the development of that area."
"We had public input sessions that were vital in developing the plan. In addition to that, we had NC State University prepare, conduct and analyze a survey for us on parks and recreation primarily focusing on what recreation activities the people were interested in and which activies they participated in. Next, we looked at our program participation rates. It is really important for us to have a historical perspective of what programs people participate in so we could project that participation into the future. Not only do we look at the programs the Town actually runs, but we look at private programs in our area and other non-profit groups in town. Lastly, we view the geographical distribution of facilities throughout the Town."
"With all this information, we then needed to compile a level of service to present to the public and to Town Council to say ‘is this level of service acceptable to you for our parks system?’ We came up with a three-tier parks system which included: (1) neighborhood parks, (2) community parks, and (3) metro parks."
"Our neighborhood parks are generally 10 - 20 acres; community parks 25 -100 acres, and metro parks, such as Bond Park, over 100 acres. The level of service that we derived from all of this was a 2.2 acres per thousand residents for neighborhood parks, 2.1 acres per thousand residents for community parks and 3.2 acres for our metro parks system. A level of service of 7.5 acres per thousand people for town park facilities."
"In our neighborhood parks, we were looking at developing a system that includes facilities such as playgrounds, open play fields, tennis courts and picnic shelters that maybe would not be scheduled by people all the time so the neighborhood could walk there to play. For our community parks we are looking at those and other facilities that might be on a more scheduled basis. In our metro parks, there are a multitude of facilities available."
"Another important component of our master plan is the greenways plan which is also an important part of the transportation plan. The goals of our greenways plans are to primarily follow the streams throughout our jurisdiction. We want to provide some connectivity, especially to other parks and to our school system. Greenways are an excellent way to provide green space and to preserve our open space. We can provide long term multi-use recreational opportunities through our greenways so that people can bike, walk, rollerblade and roller-skate on them. It is also an excellent method of alternative transportation. The greenways goal adopted in the plan is to build two miles of greenway per year."
"Our ten year master plan costs are approximately $53 million dollars for the development of parks and park facilities and community centers, exclusive of land acquisition costs or inflation. This is through the year 2010. However, these projects are not written in stone. With any parks plan, it’s really important that we maintain some flexibility so that we can adjust to changes in trends. With doing that, it is going to be important that we update that plan over the years so that we can make adjustments based on population changes and those trends. Our plan for the greenways is to build 2 miles a year which comes to about $500,000 per year for greenway development. This figure does not include land acquisition costs."
You may Email your comments to Mary Barry at mbarry@ci.cary.nc.us or call her at 469-4066.