City drops three parks from future plans

A recalculation of needed parkland to accommodate population growth in McMinnville led to the elimination of three planned parks in the city’s 20-year plan for recreation.

City Council and the Planning Commission held a joint work session last week to discuss adopting policies from the Parks, Recreation and Open Space plan into the city’s comprehensive plan.

“In land use we have to go through a process of adopting something through a state regulated process to be able to use that document for our land use provisions,” Community Development Director Heather Richards said.

Part of that discussion centered on the amount of parkland needed for minimum levels of service for city residents.

In the former 1999 Parks Plan, the city used a metric of 14 acres of parkland for every 1,000 residents, which was based on standards that are no longer recommended, according to the PROS plan.

The new plan adopted the city’s current level of parkland at 10.3 acres per 1,000 residents after looking at past unmet goals and future maintenance costs.

“After going through the community engagement process and the analysis of what our existing system has done and what we’ve been able to achieve, there was a decision made to move forward with a level of service based on our existing conditions,” Richards said.

Due to the change, the amount of future parkland needed in the city’s Urban Growth Boundary areas was reduced, eliminating the need for planned neighborhood parks in the Southwest area and near Booth Bend Road and a community park in the Fox Ridge Road area, according to Richards.

“Because we are reducing the level of service of acreage per capita in our parks system we need to amend the framework plan,” she said. “The amendment actually reduces the amount of parkland acreage in the UGB expansion area from 254 acres to 127 acres.

“There’s a 50% reduction in the total acreage of parkland in the UGB expansion areas.”

The “areas” refer to portions of town in the UGB boundary that are going through area planning processes for development. The city has completed area plans for Fox Ridge Road and Three Mile Lane.

City parks are divided into different categories based on size, development and use and include parklets of a half-acre or less such as Bend-O-River Park in southeast McMinnville and neighborhood parks such as Jay Pearson in west McMinnville that are larger but serve a specific area. Other categories are community parks such as Joe Dancer; special use parks such as Riverside Drive Dog Park; and trails and open space.

The community park planned for the Southwest Area was 20 acres at an estimated cost to purchase and develop the land of $26 million. The Fox Ridge Park was planned for eight acres at an estimated cost of $10 million, and the Booth Bend site hadn’t been determined, according to the PROS plan.

Councilor Sal Peralta took issue with the removal of planned parks at Booth Bend and Fox Ridge Road over environmental concerns.

“You raised two big red flags,” Peralta said. “If those are the same places that I’m thinking, those are two of the last hardwood groves that we have in the city. So if our plan is not to protect that, I kind of have a problem with that.”

Parks and Recreation Director Susan Muir said the projected parkland in UGB expansion areas are minimums and the city could use its equity tools at a later date to refine the plans.

The city is also working on Natural Resources planning that could put in protections for the groves, according to Richards.

“We have an inventory of high value tree groves that we want to protect through our planning process as well,” she said. “That’s separate from the parks plan, it would keep (the groves) in private ownership, they just wouldn’t be able to eliminate the groves themselves or impact them.” She added that the city “would transfer the development value of protecting those groves to their property so they could do more on the rest of their property.”

Peralta noted that the groves are currently unprotected and their preservation was discussed during the Fox Ridge Road Area Plan process.

“My recollection of the Fox Ridge discussion was very much that these were going to be protected and not just by the inventory that you’re describing that we haven’t adopted yet, but also by the fact that we were talking about putting trails and parkland in those spaces,” Peralta said. “And so those choices, those two particular choices, raise a significant concern to me.”

No votes were taken at the work session. The city will hold the first of two public hearings on the comprehensive plan adoptions at a Nov. 7 Planning Commission meeting. City Council is scheduled to vote on an ordinance in January that, if adopted, would go into effect in February, according to city staff.