Rick Jaffe was trained as a management consultant and a software engineer. After attending last week’s Parks Master Plan public workshop, he sent this letter to Westport Parks & Recreation Department director Erik Barbieri:
Last night’s Public Workshop showed me a critical flaw in our town’s Parks Master Plan process: We are trying to solve a problem without first having determined what that problem is.
We are building a 10-year Parks Master Plan for enhancing our town’s parks offerings without first having figured out what park-related resources we as a community need.
When I was a member of our town’s Representative Town Meeting, I tried to interest your predecessor to spearhead a ‘Needs Assessment’ to figure out what parks resources would best fit our community’s needs, and compare that to what our town currently offers.
Then we could build a long-term plan that would include evaluating our current parks resources, and identifying opportunities for change and improvement to come closer to the ideal of providing the best possible parks for our community.
When we put the cart before the horse as we are doing now, solving the Parks Master Plan process without first knowing what we want the Master Plan to lead to, we make mistakes in identifying what to do and what not to do, and with what priority.
The result will be a less-than-optimal plan and, eventually, less than optimal parks resources available to our community. Without the Needs study, we may miss important issues. A community suggestion coming from your Public Workshops can easily be overlooked, or recognized but prioritized too low, for want of support from actual data.
Here are two examples. An outdoor fitness center, or a network of outdoor fitness centers, is so valued by communities that recently AARP funded this one, and installed one in 53 US states and territories.
Outdoor fitness center. (Photo/Dan Foard, Videophotog Productions)
(FitLot’s inventor lives so close to us that they could be here to talk about it in minutes if we ask).
And what about a splash pad for kids? Other communities love them. From my personal observation (admittedly short on hard data), splash pads provide significant squeals of delight per square foot.
Splash pad.
There are communities out there that engage in the process of getting various user groups, like teenagers, to design their own parks, thereby maximizing the chance that those user groups will benefit.
Without a Needs Assessment the planning process is guided by feel, lucky guesses and experience.
Our town is unique and has unique needs, ones that require real community input to identify needs along with resources that are already in place that can be leveraged to better fit the lifestyles of our community members.
This is our chance to revamp the parks resources in Westport in a way that will not require a Master Plan re-do down the line because the actual needs and wants of the Westport community – as identified by the members themselves – were not addressed.
We can fix this, but we have to do it now, before the cart is cast in cement before the horse.
(“06880″‘s Opinion pages are open to all. Email submissions to 06880blog@gmail.com. To support this hyper-local blog with a tax-deductible contribution, please click here.)
