City leaders are falling behind on their goal to bring more parks to underserved areas.
AUSTIN, Texas — The city of Austin is feeling the impacts of a 2023 bill that limits parkland fees and requirements for developers.
On Nov. 21, the Austin City Council approved a resolution directing the city manager to explore additional funding strategies to sustain city parks and to explore a regional approach to parks funding, acquisition and maintenance strategy. The goal is to ensure city parks are maintained and everyone has equal access, including underserved areas.
“In the last 10 years, we’ve added something like 96 new parks and 1,500 acres of parkland, but it’s still far off and far away from what we had set out to do in our long-range plan,” said District 10 Council Member Alison Alter.
The Long Range Plan put in place five years ago calls for 4,000 to 8,000 acres of new parkland by 2029 and providing equal access to all residents. The city council defined equal access as making sure everyone in the urban core has a park within a quarter-mile or a half-mile for those outside the urban core.
This map from 2019 highlights in yellow all the areas that were park deficient. You can see it’s all over the city.
The map below from 2023 shows a slight improvement, with 72% of Austinites having appropriate access, up from about 65% in 2017, according to Alter.
Alter said it’s becoming more important to create these dedicated spaces as the city plans to make housing more dense, but the council has hit a financial snag.
“It’s an enormous loss,” said Alter.
Alter said a good chunk of funding for parks used to come from charging developers parkland dedication fees, but a bill passed in the 2023 legislative session put a limit on that.
“So we’ve gone from having, you know, tens of millions of dollars coming in annually from this, to we’ll have $1 million a year,” Alter.
The law also prevents the city from requiring parkland for the new developments.
“Imagine you add 1,000 people in an apartment complex and you are not required to have a park space, essentially,” said Alter.
Alter said they also exhausted their land acquisition funding and can’t get another bond on the ballot until 2025 or 2026.
Funding is also needed to increase the frequency of parks being cleaned. Alter said a new study shows the current work didn’t even meet the city’s standards in 2014. To address that, 16 maintenance workers were included in the budget. Alter said they need 50 more to hit the gold standard.
The resolution calls for the city manager to provide funding recommendations by May 2025.
