Parks commissioner asks for more authority

Deirdre Newman

Would the city be better off if the Parks and Recreation Commission

was invested with more authority to make decisions on parks, parkways

and medians?

Parks and Recreation Commissioner Byron de Arakal posed this

question to his colleagues on Wednesday with the goal of making the

approval process more efficient.

De Arakal said he would like to explore the possibility of having

issues concerning these three items go straight from the Parks and

Recreation Commission to the City Council, thereby bypassing the

Planning Commission. To do so, the City Council would need to give

the Parks and Recreation Commission planning authority over these

items.

One of the catalysts for de Arakal’s frustration was tortuous

approval for the TeWinkle Park Master Plan, which bounced around from

commission to commission to council and then back to the commissions.

If the Parks Commission had the authority of a planning

commission, “you avoid park-specific plans just getting dismembered

and torn to pieces over time because they’re going through three

different bodies,” de Arakal said.

Some of his colleagues expressed reservations with his preliminary

proposal.

“I have a concern that in the quest to make government more

efficient, details might not be allowed enough public scrutiny since

there would be one less level of review if the Planning Commission

review was eliminated,” parks Commissioner Wendy Leece said. “A case

in point is the current lack of input from the Mesa del Mar residents

regarding the tree removal and extension of the fields at TeWinkle

Park.”

The Planning Commission has the authority to regulate the growth,

development and beautification of the city for things such as public

and private buildings, parks and vacant lots. The Parks and

Recreation Department has the power to create policies on parks,

recreation, recreation facilities and parkway policies and make

recommendations to the council.

De Arakal said another reason he believes streamlining the process

is important is to avoid the politicization of park plans.

“The TeWinkle and Fairview [Park] master plans -- those plans got

politicized a lot because a lot of the people that were looking at

them were running for council,” de Arakal said. “And that’s not to

say that nobody on the Parks Commission won’t ever run for an office.

I’m not going to, that’s for sure.”

He hopes that no one on the planning staff views his exploration

as a power grab.

Some planning commissioners expressed their support for more

efficiency in the approval process, but didn’t embrace de Arakal’s

proposal in its entirety.

“I believe it’s important to have checks and balances and believe

the land-use, environmental impact review that the Planning

Commission takes with these kinds of projects is important to the

process,” Planning Commissioner Katrina Foley said. “And the

recreational perspective needs to be balanced against the land-use,

environmental impact review process.”

The reason that TeWinkle Park was so cumbersome was that it was

not processed correctly and really only needed to be considered by

the Parks and Recreation Commission and the Planning Commission,

Foley said.

Another issue brought up by de Arakal’s suggestion is general plan

conformity.

The Planning Commission needs to review any proposal for a

building or structure to make sure it conforms with the general plan

and therefore was required to review TeWinkle Park’s Master Plan,

said Perry Valantine, assistant Development Services director, in an

August memo.

Although not all areas of the park contain buildings and

structures, it’s not feasible to take out only the parts that do have

structures and not examine whether nonstructural features conform

with the general plan, Valantine wrote.

De Arakal said he is interested to find out if other cities have

multiple planning commissions. He said he has done some research and

found that the state gives city councils a good deal of autonomy in

giving commissions planning authority.

Marianne Milligan, senior deputy city attorney, said she would

need to research to see if the appropriate statutory responsibilities

for parks, parkways and medians could be delegated from the Planning

Commission to the Parks and Recreation Commission.