The City of Merced City Council met jointly as the Public Financing and Economic Development Authority (PFEDA), the Parking Authority, and the Successor Agency to the Redevelopment Agency on Monday, September 21, 2026, at 6:00 PM in the City Council Chamber at the Merced Civic Center, 678 W. 18th Street, Merced, CA. A study session began at 4:00 PM, closed session at 5:00 PM, and the regular meeting at 6:00 PM. The primary topics were a study session on the draft Parks, Recreation, and Open Space Master Plan, a large consent calendar, several public comments, a council discussion on the structure of city boards and commissions, and a proclamation for Constitution Week. Spanish and Hmong translation services were available at the meeting.
Okay, we're good. Good afternoon, everyone. We'll call our study session to order. Agenda item A, study session roll call. Council member to Pont. Present. Present. Harris. President Smith. May approach him boyle. Mayor Serato. Here. Agenda item B study session. B one study session to review the parks, recreation, and open space, pro as master plan. Thank you, Chirch. Good evening, Mr. Mayor, um, City Council, colleagues, and community residents. Um, Christopher Jensen here, Parks and Community Services Director for the City of Merced. Um, we're here this evening to have a study session for the council and public to review our um proposed draft parks, recreation, and open space master plan. Just revisit a little bit about this planning process and the use of this document for the city of Mercedes. Uh, municipalities typically adopt updated Parks Rec open space master plans about every ten years to help uh prioritize community values, projects, programming policies, and funding initiatives. Since that time, we've had continued growth of our University UC Cal UC California Merced, also a recession, an economic downturn, some bounce back from that, and some amazing growth over the last five years in different areas of our community. So the need for updating our plan is vital for us. We want to make sure that we're capturing current priorities in our community that's growing and make sure that it's addressing aged infrastructure, current programs and practices and policies, and also future growth. In order to do that, uh we solicited outside uh funding from Central Valley Opportunity Fund. I want to thank their representative from Opportunity Merced, Kim Gardner, who's here this evening. Her board invested in this plan initiative, and we adopted a um a tagline of playing on purpose in MERSED through this initiative. We hired a consultant, 110%, who subcontract subcontracted K2UA who helped do the analysis and the planning documents with our team. The goal here is to establish the long-term vision for park developments, guiding resource allocation, ensuring effective community engagement processes along the way, and fostering a sense of place in our community. Through our consultant, we identified a tri uh trident model of community analysis. We did in-person community visits across our park system. We also identified uh 12 to 15 wisdom holders who you see represented here. These are community members that are affiliated with several organizations across our our city, and represent various perspectives and levels of involvement with parks, community services, and recreation. We want to thank Cultiva Central Valley, Lifeline CDC, Merced Bike Coalition, Merced County Association of Realtors, County Public Health, the Garden Club, Merced Lau Family, Merced Sunrise Rotary, Merced Senior Inc., Youth Soccer, Merced Youth Soccer League, the NAACP of the County, Youth Leadership Institute, and Valley Onward. This planning process took took approximately 18 months to date. That timeline included over 500 total engagements with various pop-ups and events across our city for a 12-month duration. We also did a community online survey, which uh collected over almost 1,400 responses. And we had an open house uh last winter, I believe in February, where we had 200 members of the community attend and look at the analysis to that point and give their finalized thoughts on what priorities we should take on moving forward for our plan. From that process, there's a lot of different perspectives in our community, all have valid uh real-lived experience that give rise to those voices, but ultimately we can only do so much as a staff and uh on your behalf. So our goal was to really look at what are the cross-cutting issues through these various 1,400 comments, 200 plus attendees and various uh stakeholder engagements we took on. And we came up with four priority areas. The majority of the comments and input we received revolved around infrastructure and maintenance, representing current park infrastructure, its aging deterioration, and also um live commitments that we have to future developed parks that have not been built out yet. We also have connected community, which represents the importance of being informed from residents to ensure our services are reflective of their goals and values and needs in the community, and also to ensure that residents know what we're doing and can access that participation. Safety and inclusion represents providing welcoming, inclusive, and safe services for all. This isn't just about our relationship with our first responders and public safety, uh, which it very much is part of this, but it's also the fact that we want to make sure if we are not providing services in a manner that allows certain groups of our community to access them, we need to take a look at that and modify either our outreach, our programming, um, or who we have uh providing services. Resources and stewardship represents the fact that we have a unique set of skills in parks and community services. We have limited resources, but we have an abundance of community stakeholders that want to participate. One of the things we heard from 110% consultants was how much community feedback and input they got in a town this size. They were really blown away by the level of community engagement and the willingness of our residents to step up and be a part of the solution moving forward. So this evening, um, about a month ago, we two months ago, excuse me, we presented the the PROS plan in its uh draft form to this council.