City working on parks plan

As the City of Sisters dedicated its new Fir Street Park, City staff and the Parks Advisory Board have presented a preliminary revision of the City's parks plan.

The original parks capital improvement plan, adopted by the city council in 2011, included some 71 projects with a price tag estimated between $7 million and $20 million and a timeline stretching at least a decade. The revised plan, presented at a workshop last month, trimmed the list of proposed projects down to about 18, with a cost of just short of $2 million and a timeline of 10 years.

The projects were broken into three tiers of priorities.

Priority I projects include replacing restrooms at the Village Green and improving the play structures there. Whychus Creek access is also identified as Priority II, as are seat walls at Barclay Park.

Priorities could shift depending on interest and resources. For instance, Community Development Director Pauline Hardie noted, a Priority II project like a sand volleyball court at Clemens Park could end up coming to fruition faster than a Priority I project if a community group charged ahead on the project and secured funding.

Priority III also includes dedicating $732,000 for purchase of bare land, at least some of which could be the site of an ice rink if the City's Community Assets Committee determines that one is viable. Mayor Brad Boyd told The Nugget that the council would ask the citizens to vote in a referendum on a project of that scale.

Parks Advisory Board Chair Liam Hughes said that, "there was significant discussion of some of the items, especially around Whychus Creek access, but I didn't hear any objection to any of these projects as we presented (the revised capital improvement plan)."

Hughes is the executive director of Sisters Park & Recreation District. Asked about SPRD's possible future role in owning and managing parks, he said that SPRD has limited resources, devoted to programs.

"The City spends on parks what we get in tax revenue for SPRD," he said.

How the projects will be paid for remains up in the air. Some amount will be paid for by parks systems development charges (SDCs), attached to each new dwelling unit. The August presentation to the council included an SDC figure of $2,369 - if all the projects were paid for through SDCs. The current SDC is $632.

However, Hardie told the council that the $2,369 figure is not where the SDC will end up, because projects cannot be paid for entirely through SDCs.

SDCs have to be assessed based on actual impacts of new dwelling (and/or lodging) units on infrastructure. Staff is still working on a methodology to determine what portions of the various projects are "eligible" to be paid for through SDCs.

Hardie said that the next step in the process is to use whatever methodology is decided upon to determine an actual SDC number and bring it back to the council. The city council will have to adopt the capital improvement plan, which will be subject to hearings.