We will go ahead and get tonight's study session started.

We have Jasmine that needs to be admitted online.

All right.

So tonight we are going to go over the comprehensive recreation parks and open space plan.

And I will quickly mic pass over to the team that we have here tonight.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for having us and for giving us this opportunity to share Erie Outside, which is the name that's given to this plan.

It's the comprehensive recreation parks and open space plan.

Before we begin, I'd like to just recognize and thank everyone who contributed to this effort.

This effort represents more than a year of collaboration with our consultant team from Design Workshop led by Brena Laffy, as well as city departments, particularly public works and planning.

And I just would like to recognize the team that we've been working with who are mostly here tonight, and I I love that.

Jason Sayers is the director of public works.

Jeff Gibbons is the assistant director of public works, Hannah O'Leschi in Planning, Gary, Gary Graham, Bureau of Parks, Steve Joint, Deputy Director of Deputy Assistant Bureau Chief of Parks, I'm sorry.

Cooper Moore, assistant planner, and Liz Reyes, who is now in MOCA.

So that has been our internal team working team for over a year and a half and really has been a collaboration between the two departments.

So this plan is more than a vision.

It is a roadmap for action.

And while it sets an ambitious direction for the future of Erie's parks, recreation system and public spaces, it is grounded in the city's fiscal realities and operational capacity.

Most importantly, most importantly, this plan reflects commitment to ensuring that every resident has a safe, welcoming, and accessible public space spaces regardless of where they live in the city.

With that, I am pleased to turn things over to Brenna from Design Workshop to walk us through Erie outside and the key recommendations that have emerged through this process.

Thank you.

Thank you, Jackie, and thank you all for giving me the time to speak today.

Excited to go through this planning process with you and answer any questions that you have.

So just to give you an overview, we're gonna give you some background about the planning context and how to navigate the plan contents.

We'll talk through the vision and plan framework.

So that's the strategies and the actions, and then we'll talk about prioritization for investments in projects and an implementation strategy.

Okay, so just where we're at in the planning process.

We're here in the in the fourth column, the last phase of the planning process.

We started in in spring of 2025, really started with a grounding of conditions.

So understanding what parks does the city manage and maintain, what is the condition of those parks, what amenities they have, making sure we had a solid inventory of the parks, amenities, and programs.

And then we pair that with uh trend data, um, analysis on the community profile, demographic trends, um, to take a look at the the context in which the park system exists.

Um then we moved into uh community engagement, and I'll say it's not a totally linear process.

Some of these phases overlap, and an engagement was really a part of the process throughout.

Um we started off with some targeted youth engagement with youth worksheets that were distributed across many different events that the city helped to collect.

Uh, and then we had a celebrate Erie open house uh during that festival uh setup where anybody could walk in at any time and participate in activities and share their thoughts.

Um paired with a survey that was open through the fall of uh 2025 and a series of I think 29 community events that the city helped to get the word out, collect more feedback across the the planning process.

Um we then took all of what we heard from that uh community survey and engagement and analysis to begin drafting the plan vision and themes and framework.

And we uncovered some gaps and areas where we needed to find out more information with a series of four focus groups and about 20 individual stakeholder conversations to understand more specific needs and understanding the partner network a little bit better in terms of program offerings.

And expanded outreach with a youth focused workshop specifically targeting youth and recreation needs.

And then now we are in the plan development phase, so we've wrapped all of that additional feedback into some adjustments and more detailed action plan.

Okay, so we're here at this meeting today.

We have a public comment period that we're anticipating will be June 22nd through July 21st.

That will be when the draft plan document is published online, and there will be some outreach during that time period as well to bring the plan and explain some of the recommendations.

And then we're anticipating based off of that that adoption may happen in August.

A little bit of framework to kind of set the stage and understanding, you know, as Jackie mentioned, this is an ambitious plan, but from the beginning we had conversations that it needs to be rooted in reality and it needs to have actionable strategies.

Something to note is that when we take a look at kind of the condition and quality of parks, there are a lot of parks that are in need of kind of basic upgrades.

So things like ADA accessibility and improvements to aging infrastructure.

And so we've estimated about 17 to 20 million of estimated deferred maintenance across the park system.

There are 50 parks in the city of Erie that are Parks Bureau managed or owned and maintained, and about 350 acres.

We'll get into a little bit more details around benchmarking, but you know, that's a lot of parks, and a low amount of operating budget to be able to manage and maintain that many parks when you compare to your peers, and we'll get into that.

And community expectations are growing.

We've heard from across the community, you know, they want safer, cleaner, more comfortable parks.

Parks are really important to people in their everyday life, but also their memories and what they find important to their families and community.

So ultimately, we hope that this plan creates a path forward to help prioritize decision making, pursue grants, and build partnerships to build this over time.

It also doesn't exist in a silo.

It exists among many other plans that the city of Erie has gone through, some of which are older, and so what we do when we start this planning process is read through everything that you all have to make sure that we're pulling in pieces and understanding maybe something that needs to be revisited or understood more deeply, and making sure that the park system exists within the context of not only City of Erie plans but also the statewide comprehensive outdoor recreation plan and more regional planning efforts like the Lake Erie Watershed Conservation Plan.

And some of those key themes from past plans that we pulled, you know, there's a strong emphasis on environmental stewardship across many of those plans, connectivity and mobility, expanding trail networks, greenways, multimodal streets, including to parks, strengthening neighborhoods and equity.

Many of the plans talk about prioritizing access, culturally relevant amenities and universal accessibility, as well as prioritizing underserved neighborhoods, placemaking and activation, investing in downtown parks, neighborhood green spaces, and the bayfront, partnerships, coordinating across jurisdictions and adopting asset management and maintenance strategies.

Some of these things are mentioned across these different plans.