By Kristen Taketa
The San Diego City Council on Tuesday replaced its 65-year-old parks master plan with a new funding formula that city officials said will prioritize underserved and park-deficient neighborhoods.
The council also committed to creating 100 more acres of parks over the next 10 years and voted to create a regional park at Chollas Creek Watershed in Barrio Logan.
Those moves are all part of a new city parks master plan to replace the current one written in 1956. San Diego has since added about a million people and there is much less space to build parks, officials said.
The new plan is meant to address the city’s long-standing inequities in parks funding, which over the years have resulted in some neighborhoods having plenty of funds to build more and higher-quality parks while other neighborhoods have made do with fewer, sparser parks.
The crux of the new master plan is an overhaul of how developer fees will be used to help fund parks.
When developers build new housing in San Diego, they must pay the city an impact fee to pay for parks. The city’s old funding formula required that those fees pay for parks in the neighborhood where the developer was building.
That created an inequitable parks system, city officials say, because wealthier neighborhoods that got new development also got money for new or better parks, while neighborhoods with older housing, less available land and a shortage of parks got left out.
In the past 10 years, 80 percent of developer park fees have paid for parks in the northern part of San Diego, while southern San Diego had fewer parks and, fewer amenities and programs, according to a city staff report. A city website about the master plan, sandiego.gov/parks-for-all-of-us, shows photos comparing relatively bare playgrounds and parks in some neighborhoods with others with lots of colorful play structures, sprawling sports fields and other amenities.
The COVID-19 lockdowns showed how crucial parks can be, City Councilmember Vivian Moreno said at Tuesday’s council meeting. Parks can provide safe places for kids to play and for seniors to walk and exercise, she said, but park shortages are why some kids have to play soccer on basketball courts or in parking lots.
“We need to face facts: Our existing standard has only worked for the richest, newest communities in our city,” Moreno said. “This park standard simply hasn’t worked to build parks where they’re needed the most.”
The city’s new funding formula will create a uniform, citywide park development fee to replace the neighborhood-specific fees, which varied in amount depending on the neighborhood.
The new formula will send 80 percent of the citywide fees to communities designated as park-deficient, and at least 50 percent of the fees will go to the city’s so-called “communities of concern” for at least five years.
Communities of concern are neighborhoods that rank poorly in various socioeconomic and environmental measurements in the city’s climate equity index, factors such as traffic density, poverty rate, educational attainment and healthy food access.
All the neighborhoods that would qualify as a community of concern, according to the parks plan, are located south of Interstate 8 or near the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the city’s climate equity index scores.
The fees will generally range from $6,600 to $18,000 per housing unit built, depending on size, type and whether it’s in a transit priority area. Developers would only have to pay 10 percent of the fees to the citywide fund if they build a park on-site.
The City Council will approve spending of the citywide park development fees.
The new parks plan also changes the city’s baseline standard for parks.
The city used to require 2.8 acres of parks per 1,000 residents. But that standard has been increasingly challenging to meet because of the city’s growing population, rising land values and declining availability of vacant land, city officials said. That also puts denser, older neighborhoods with smaller and fewer parks at a disadvantage.
Instead of continuing the parks standard based on acreage, the council adopted a points value system that will measure the quality of a park, rather than just its size. Points will be given for park qualities such as size, activities, amenities and accessibility.
The city’s new standard is 100 park value points per 1,000 people.
The council approved the parks master plan by a vote of 8-1, with Councilmember Chris Cate voting no.
Cate said that while he supports the vast majority of the parks master plan, he cannot vote for it because the new funding formula does not guarantee that growing communities like his — which also need new parks — would get any of the developer park fee funding. His district includes Mira Mesa, where tens of thousands of new units and residents are expected in the next few years.
“For a community that I know we’re asking them to take on tens of thousands of units and not provide any guarantee of funding to those communities ... I just can’t do that,” Cate said.
More than 30 people made public comments about the new master plan Tuesday. Most voiced support and most who had concerns asked the council to make revisions rather than reject the plan entirely.
kristen.taketa@sduniontribune.com