Let’s put some park fee rumors to rest. Restoring the free use of our parks to improve our quality of life is step one in making our parks a higher, not a lower priority. Doing parks smarter includes keeping our parks open year-round, properly staffing our parks, providing excellent maintenance and empowering volunteers to better complement our staff.
The next time you hear a rumor claiming that our county would be fiscally irresponsible to properly fund our parks, please inform them that they have it exactly backward. Our county staff has worked very hard and succeeded in cutting millions without cutting services by working smarter in every department.
Our staff will share this with our community so we can see how we can responsibly afford to apply a tiny fraction of those savings to properly fund our county parks.
We would like to manage our parks much smarter than we are now by freeing ourselves from an interlocal agreement with the city of Vancouver.