How Sacramento County decides where to build new suburban parks

The decision is made years before anyone digs anything, in documents almost nobody reads, and by the time there is a groundbreaking with a ribbon, every meaningful choice has already been settled.

I read planning commission agendas so other people do not have to. Here is how a park actually happens.

It starts with a master plan

Jurisdictions adopt a parks and recreation master plan, typically looking ten or twenty years ahead. It sets a standard, usually expressed as acres of parkland per thousand residents, and it maps where the existing parks are.

Then it identifies the gaps. Areas that fall below the standard, or that are more than a certain walking distance from any park.

That document is where the priorities are set. It goes through public workshops, which are usually attended by a small number of engaged residents, and those people have a genuinely disproportionate influence on what the county spends the next decade doing.

If you want to affect where parks go, that is the meeting. Not the one about the specific park.

Then the money

This is where most people's assumptions are wrong. Parks in new suburban areas are generally not built out of general tax revenue.

They are paid for by development. When a subdivision is approved, the developer is required either to dedicate land for parks, or to pay a fee in lieu of dedication, or some combination. In California the enabling law for this is commonly known as the Quimby Act, and local ordinances implement it.

There are also development impact fees, and in some areas special districts where residents tax themselves to build and maintain parks in their own neighbourhood.

The consequence of this funding structure is important: parkland tends to follow new development, because new development is what generates the money and the land dedication. Older neighbourhoods that were built before these requirements existed frequently have fewer parks and no mechanism to fund new ones.

That is a structural inequity and it is not the result of anyone deciding older neighbourhoods matter less.

The land itself

Developers dedicate land, and they dedicate the land they cannot easily build on.

Floodplain. Drainage basins. Steep ground. Utility easements. Odd shaped remnants left after the street grid was laid out.

Some of this is fine. A detention basin that is dry most of the year makes a perfectly good ball field, and combining drainage with recreation is sensible engineering.

Some of it is not, and the staff reports on these dedications are worth reading, because the negotiation over what counts as usable acreage is where the public interest is either protected or given away.

What actually gets built

Once the land exists, there is a design process, and this is the part with the most public participation and the least consequence.

Residents show up to argue about playground equipment, dog areas, whether there should be a basketball court, lighting and noise. Those arguments are real and they matter to the people having them.

The decisions that determined whether there would be a park at all, how big, and where, were made years earlier by people who were not in that room.

The maintenance question

The thing nobody asks about and the thing that determines whether a park is any good in fifteen years.

Building a park is a capital cost, funded by development fees. Maintaining it is an operating cost, funded from the general budget or an assessment district, forever.

A jurisdiction that accepts dedication of a great deal of parkland without securing a maintenance funding source is creating a future problem. You can see the results of that decision across the country in parks with broken equipment and dead turf.

Ask about the maintenance funding at the meeting. It is the question staff are least often asked and most able to answer honestly.

How to follow it

The master plan, and the capital improvement programme, which lists projects and their funding years.

Planning commission and board of supervisors agendas, which are published in advance and which include the staff reports. The staff report is the actual document. The agenda item is one line.

Conditions of approval on subdivision maps, which is where the park dedication is recorded.

None of this is secret. All of it is tedious, which is a more effective barrier than secrecy has ever been.