Setting a tight-budget plan for how to sustain Seattle's parks

WHILE citizens and elected officials debate the wisdom of pursuing program cuts, taxes or new revenues to balance Seattle's 2011 budget, we should recognize the unhappy fact that there is a larger, more serious structural problem with our city's finances. In short, statewide tax initiatives have limited the city's abilities to grow revenues commensurate with costs.

By 2011, Seattle's parks will be struggling with cumulative operations and maintenance shortfalls of $25 million to $30 million annually. Add in an estimated $200 million in deferred maintenance costs and we clearly face enormous and compounding challenges. To ensure our city can deliver essential services to all its citizens — including well-maintained parks, playgrounds and community centers — we must do more than debate the fairest way to slice the pie. We need a bigger pie.

Over the past decade, Seattle Parks Foundation has raised nearly $30 million to create and enhance parks and green spaces throughout the city. We are advocates for a great park system that provides recreational opportunity, cultural engagement and economic value to every citizen — now and for generations to come. We believe this growing funding gap is a looming crisis that breaks faith with the voters and donors who so generously and passionately support our city's parks.

There is no silver bullet. No single course of action can address all the needs of our park system. The scale of the problem demands new thinking and an array of solutions that will include thoughtful policy changes, new partnerships and creative financing strategies. Luckily, we are not short on good ideas for how we can promote financial sustainability of Seattle's parks.

We can invest in innovative efforts by the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department to capture new efficiencies and generate new revenues in their operations. We can build on the achievement of community partners, such as the Associated Recreation Council, the Woodland Park Zoo and the Seattle Aquarium, that bring additional resources and capacity to our system. We can actively promote private philanthropy of all kinds and at all levels. More volunteers, individual donors and institutional contributions must all be part of the mix.

We can also establish improvement districts to support specific parks, or zoning incentives that encourage developers to contribute to the creation and maintenance of green space. These are proven strategies that capture the real economic value that park facilities and programs bring to surrounding neighborhoods.

And finally, we can work together to secure significant new public-sector resources for the system as a whole. This starts by building community awareness of the problem: state-imposed structural barriers that prevent Seattle from budgeting to adequately care for our parks.

With our elected officials in Olympia, we can begin to explore how Seattle — and other cities across the state — might opt out of or override statewide initiatives that prevent us from funding services we believe are essential. We can examine all the different levy options that could address shortfalls in parks' operations and maintenance. And we can look closely at how 14 different metropolitan parks districts in our state are already providing new and dedicated resources in support of parks.

To carefully consider these ideas, and others, we need a thoughtful, informed, communitywide conversation about how we care for our parks, green spaces, community centers and other public spaces. People need a chance to express their ideas for, concerns about, or support of any important policy proposal. Together we can rethink and reinvent how we can all take care of our city and its green legacy.