Jun 1, 2008

PARKS IN PERIL

Ordinance may help raise money to fix rec areas

By Will Oremus / Daily News Staff Writer

Every year, San Mateo's small neighborhood parks slip a bit further toward disrepair.

There are the tennis courts at Beresford Park, two of which have been out of commission off and on for years. There's the field at Martin Luther King Community Park, which gets torn up a bit worse each rainy season.

The city's parks department estimates it would need about $2 million a year to keep all the parks in top shape. Costs for all the needed capital improvements have soared to $55 million, including $12 million for a planned 12-acre park in the new Bay Meadows development.

But the parks department's only reliable revenue stream is a set of developer fees that raise an annual average of $500,000.

On Monday, the city council will consider an ordinance that could double that income without raising the fees outright. It would still leave huge funding gaps, but officials say it may be the best they can hope for at a time when the budget is lean citywide.

"When times get tight, it's generally parks and rec and the library that are seen as non-essential services," said Council Member Jack Matthews. "People just don't have the same attitude about how vital they are" compared to things like streets, fire protection and police.

For decades, the city has required developers to either build park space into their projects or pay a "park in-lieu fee" based on the number of bedrooms they're creating. It's a mechanism used by many cities in the Bay Area as a way to ensure that open space keeps up with population growth.

In San Mateo, however, the fee in recent years has raised far too little to pay for new park space. In fact, it doesn't even bring in enough money to properly keep up the parks that already exist, said Dennis Frank, the city's landscape architect.

"The population in the city is growing, but the inventory of parks is the same," Frank said. "So there are more and more people demanding the use of our community parks, and the in-lieu fees just aren't cutting it."

Karen Herrel, a former planning commissioner who lives in the Beresford-Hillsdale neighborhood, said she often hears parents complain that the soccer fields their kids play on are in rough shape.

"The in-lieu fees are really small in comparison to what they should be," she said.

In fact, according to a city staff report, they're the lowest of the 10 major cities on the Peninsula.

Simply raising the fees, however, is not on the table at this point.

"Our city council, I think, is concerned about the cost of housing, so we can't be too greedy," Frank said.

While he didn't reject the idea of steeper park in-lieu fees, Matthews said the city has to be careful about such hikes.

"What I'm always looking at is, what do other cities charge, what are the other fees that developers pay and at what point are you sort of discouraging development?" he said. "When you start to look at the linkage fees for affordable housing, child care, art, etc., they all add up."

Instead of changing the fee rate, Frank's proposal is to tighten a loophole that gives developers big discounts for private landscaping projects such as courtyards.

"We did a survey of a number of cities on the Peninsula, and we found that our credit system is just way too generous," he said. "On projects over 30 units, we're giving an average of 60 percent credit off the fees."

The ordinance the council will consider on Monday would limit the types of projects that qualify for credit and cap the total discount at 50 percent. It would also change how the city calculates the park in-lieu fees, basing them on the number of units in a development instead of the number of bedrooms.

Even if the council passes the amendments, the city will still struggle to provide as much park space as others on the Peninsula, officials admitted.

They're hoping for additional help from area voters, who on Tuesday will decide the fate of Measure O, a sales tax hike that would bring millions for parks countywide.

Failing that, said Parks and Recreation Commissioner Ellen Mallory Ulrich, "We'll just have to keep looking at every avenue we can to get back the funding we need for parks and rec."



E-mail Will Oremus at woremus@dailynewsgroup.com.



AT A GLANCE

WHAT: San Mateo City Council meeting

WHEN: 7 p.m. Monday

WHERE: City Hall, 330 W. 20th Ave.

WHY: The council will consider changes to the city's park in-lieu fees, which are roughly one-third of the average for Peninsula cities. The city faces $55 million in needed improvements but raises just $500,000 per year from developers.