Los Angeles parks, funded by the same formula since 1937, face approximately $15 billion in maintenance and renovation needs, strained by a nearly 30% cut in full-time staff since 2009. This November, voters will decide whether to double that funding over the next decade.

Measure PRK, a charter amendment on the Nov. 3 ballot, would not add a new tax, but instead raise the minimum share of the city’s general fund allocated to the Department of Recreation and Parks over 10 years. The current rate, 0.0325% of the city’s assessed property value, would double to 0.065%, with a built-in exception allowing the city to return to the current minimum during a fiscal emergency.

Mayor Karen Bass, Controller Kenneth Mejia and 13 City Council members have endorsed the measure.

Investing in L.A.’s parks

Monica Rodriguez, L.A. Councilmember, explains why Los Angeles will lose money if the city doesn’t invest in its park facilities.

“When you fall into disrepair with our parks or any facility, it costs twice as much when you have to catch up,” said City Council member Monica Rodriguez, who represents District 7 in the northeast San Fernando Valley, at an Oct. 1 American Community Media briefing. “We’re going to either pay through liabilities claims, or we’re going to invest in modernizing and protecting and fixing our parks facilities.” 

A citywide park needs assessment found that L.A. parks face approximately $15 billion in one-time capital needs, including renovations and new facilities, and roughly $600 million in annual operating needs, including staffing and maintenance. 

Rodriguez, who secured about $1.5 million for the assessment and helped develop Measure PRK, tied it to Proposition K, a 1996 voter-approved measure that has paid for park construction for 30 years and expires next year. A 2022 measure to replace it with a new parcel tax failed.

She said locking money into the city charter protects parks more reliably than annual budget fights: “You have a lot of competing forces when it comes to budgets. By enshrining this, it forces this council and all future councils to make sure that they honor that for residents in Los Angeles.”

From 2020 to 2026 alone, L.A.’s park system dropped from 49th to 93rd out of 100 major U.S. cities, according to an annual Trust for Public Land index measuring amenities, investment, equity and more.

L.A. residents in low-income neighborhoods have access to 65% less park space per person than those in the average L.A. neighborhood and 85% less than those in high-income neighborhoods, according to the TPL analysis. 

“The best part about PRK is we’ve already got a plan,” said Rodriguez. Neglected parks in neighborhoods with little accessible green space come first, along with “some of the fundamental parts of what you need a good quality world-class park to have,” including public restrooms and “making sure that we have ADA-compliant, accessible playground equipment.”

Immediate changes

Connie Chung, HR&A Advisors and financial specialist for the Park Needs Assessment and Measure PRK, reveals some of the top problems identified by the Los Angeles Park-needs Assessment, which surveyed Los Angeles residents to assess the quality and needs of local parks.

Because “a significant portion of the increase” would fund staff and restore cut hours, “some of these changes will be felt almost immediately” by residents, said Connie Chung, a managing partner at HR&A Advisors who led financial analysis for the needs assessment. “It doesn’t necessarily mean there will be shovels in the ground in every park in every district. It means that people will see their services and general upkeep restored — the restrooms, all will be more well maintained.”

Over the past 25 years, L.A.’s parks and recreation department has acquired 117 parks and hundreds of acres, even as it absorbed a 28% drop in full-time staffing since the Great Recession.

Meanwhile, the city’s operating budget rose 68% since 2009, while the parks and recreation department’s operating budget rose only 35%.

Community feedback gathered for the park needs assessment found that Angelenos “really want the department to invest and upgrade existing parks.” said Chung. “They don’t just want to build new ones.”

“My own park is closed on Sundays,” she continued. “That doesn’t have to be the case, and to simply unlock the gates on a Sunday will be tremendously appreciated by myself and my neighbors.”

‘Repeating a cycle’

Dayana Molina, Trust for Public Land, community engagement and organizing, explains why parks are more than just a nice feature for a city.

L.A.’s neighborhoods of color have access to 54% less park space per person than the city’s average neighborhood, and 79% less than those in white neighborhoods.

Dayana Molina, a TPL organizer, said disinvestment and inequity are the major reasons L.A. keeps falling in her organization’s ParkScore ranking. 

Approximately 1.5 million Angelenos — nearly 40% of the city — don’t live within a 10-minute walk of a park, compared with 24% of the 100 largest U.S. cities.

Molina’s love for parks started at age 13, when she began playing soccer at Glassell Park in Northeast L.A.

“Back then, I thought it was totally normal for my teammates to be running around a big tree as we were in official matches,” she said. “That should not have been my experience.”

“Lucky for me, I got to see advocacy efforts on the ground very early on,” she continued: In 2000, a coalition of three dozen local organizations formed to block an industrial development on a former rail yard in Glassell Park. The coalition won in court in 2001, and in 2007 the site opened as Rio de Los Angeles State Park, soccer fields included.

More than two decades later, “I am here speaking on a professional level, and continuing to talk the same talk that I was talking at 13,” Molina said.

Middle and high school students who worked with her on urban greening projects since she joined TPL in 2018 are now in college, and are still asking for the same things due to unreliable long-term funding around these projects — a current one being greening the schoolyard at Barack Obama Global Preparation Academy in South L.A., a community school park also open to the public on Saturdays.

“I feel like we’re repeating a cycle,” said Molina. “We are at a turning point where we could perhaps prevent that from happening again … Our communities are really looking at these spaces as critical infrastructure — not as nice to have, but critical infrastructure.”

‘Demolition by neglect’

Sakae Koyama, Co-President, Friends of Elysian Park and President of the Park Advisory Board for Echo Park, explains why Los Angeles’ Measure PRK, which will increase funding for Los Angeles parks, is so critical.

Sakae Koyama, co-president of Friends of Elysian Park and a self-described “reluctant community advocate,” called L.A.’s plummet in the national park rankings after years of low investment “criminal … our park system should be in the top 10, top 20.”

In Echo Park, where Koyama has lived since she was 7, even basic upgrades can take years. 

“We’ve been asking for a bathroom by the baseball and tennis courts, and that has been going on at least six or seven years,” she said. “The prefabricated building is now installed, but the hookup is still pending, and it’s just incredible how long improvements take.”

TPL research shows that every $1 invested in parks returns, on average, at least $3 in community benefits annually, from reduced healthcare, fitness and stormwater treatment costs, to increased tax revenues and recreation savings.

L.A.’s deferred maintenance backlog alone is $2.68 billion.

At an aging rec center across from the lake at Echo Park, “when it rains, water is literally falling down the walls. And what is the solution? Because they don’t have the budget to fix it, they just close the room,” she said.

“That’s demolition by neglect to me,” continued Koyama, who “started as somebody who was frustrated, walking through the park with all the garbage, and so I would just take a pair of tongs and trash bags and pick up trash as I went along” before finding and joining Friends of Elysian Park in 2019. 

For Echo Park residents, 80% of whom are renters, “This is their backyard. This is their green space, their third space,” she explained. 

Just as voters rescued L.A.’s libraries in 2011 with Measure L, Koyama added, “We need this desperately to save our park system.”

SELEN OZTURK

ACoM editor and research director Selen Ozturk was born in Istanbul and raised in the Bay Area. She holds a philosophy degree from UC Berkeley. Her work has been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, SFGATE, Bay City News, PopMatters, and Senses of Cinema, among many other outlets.