"Plan, plan, everywhere a plan" and the Park Tax

"Plan, plan, everywhere a plan" to paraphrase an old song. Much has been made of "We have a park PLAN." (often said in capital letters.) OK, let's look at it.

First a parks plan is just that, a plan. It's not law or a contract. It’s part of the city master plan.

The city master plan "dictates public policy in terms of transportation, utilities, land use, recreation, and housing. Comprehensive plans typically encompass large geographical areas, a broad range of topics, and cover a long-term time horizon." (the park plan covers 15 years) It's based on this guidance that laws and projects come about. It short it’s “This is what we’d like to do.” But it’s not signing a contract to build a house.

The city plan includes the parks element. The parks plan is a lot of “copy/paste" from the NPFA. (National Recreation and Park Association) This organization is “dedicated to educating professionals and the public on the essential nature of parks and recreation.” NPFA recommends that given a city with many people, there needs to be much green space, trails etc. This is sort of a "one size fits all." They didn't come and survey Bonney Lake.

The estimated cost of the park plan, in 2010 was $38,495,000 dollars. Yes, that's correct, $38,495,000 dollars.

Given the recession, inflation and years to completion, no doubt the final cost will be much higher.

Under the plan the yearly cost to the taxpayers? Call it 2,500,000 per year. When I ran the numbers, the yearly 44 cent tax rate raised less than $700,000 from the homeowners. Clearly, we can see why the tax rate would soon be raised to 75 cents per thousand.

The plan mentions "15 years" to complete things but still doesn't say in what order the projects will be completed. The funny thing is that the plan does break out where the 38 million will come from. A park tax isn’t listed.

If the park tax passes, then there’s first organizing the metropolitan park district, getting office space, computers forms, desks chairs and such. Don’t believe that the current city staff, offices and budget will absorb the cost of the park district. As we pointed out earlier, the Tacoma Metropolitan Park District spends 49% of its budget on administration. Don’t expect the current city staff to do the work or a park district.

Say the tax passes. What then? Could the city immediately take out a loan and use the tax to pay it off? Sure. Now there’s all that money and what to spend it on? They could hold meetings. Picture the trails group, Frisbee golf group, museum group, community center group, sports fields group, dog park group, veteran’s monument group and other groups all arguing for the money.

So, who would you trust to make the decision?

The bottom line here remains the same. We're being asked to approve a tax. What we're not told is what the tax rate will be and what will be the first project funded.

It would make much more sense to say "We want to fund "     ". It's estimated to cost this much and this is what it will look like. Would you approve a bond?"