Mass Parks for All Strategic Oversight Plan Public Comment
Below is our public comment on the Stewardship Council’s Strategic Oversight Plan. If you’d like to submit your own comments, click here for more info — comments are due Tuesday, August 22.
Subject: Mass Parks for All Strategic Oversight Plan Public Comment
Dear Chairman Buckley and Council Members,
Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the Stewardship Council’s Strategic Oversight Plan. As a stakeholder in the effort to secure adequate funding, staffing and other resources for our state parks, Mass Parks for All (MPA) is committed to working with the Council, the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR), park friends groups, the Legislature, the Governor, and other stakeholders to bring a 21st Century vision for our parks into focus and ultimately an on the ground reality.
We thank the Council for this detailed plan, and in the interest of remaining brief, will concentrate on what we think are the most important goals and tasks within it.
On the operations budget side of the ledger, the Council has adopted the practice of recommending a funding level for DCR to the Executive Office of Administration & Finance prior to the governor’s filing of the annual budget with the Legislature. Rather than merely reacting to what the governor proposes, the Council has become a gubernatorially appointed vocal advocate for funding our parks. We support continuing this practice.
On the capital side of the ledger, the Council’s commitment to having DCR create and maintain a Capital Budget Dashboard is critically important for the Administration, the Legislature, and the public to get a handle on the $1.0 billion deferred maintenance backlog, much of which will take capital spending to alleviate. Only by seeing the need on paper and in public will the Council and other stakeholders be able to illustrate what more than a decade of under funding has done to our parks. MPA continues to believe that the present capital budget of approximately $150 million per year is insufficient to fulfill DCR’s responsibilities to the people’s parks. To successfully begin chipping away at the backlog and moving forward on new projects, DCR needs an annual $250 million capital budget for the remainder of this decade.
On the policy side of DCR operations, we fully support the Council’s plan to have DCR devote more resources to developing partnerships outside of state government, and that DCR coordinate with the recently created but as yet unstaffed Office of Outdoor Recreation to bring willing partners with private dollars to bear on the quest to bring DCR parks squarely into the 21st Century.
One need only see the visitors center at Walden Pond State Reservation, accomplished via a partnership with Walden Woods, to see the vast potential of public-private partnerships. More recently, the re-prioritization of the long discussed Charlesgate Park Revitalization project involving DCR, the Charlesgate Alliance, the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, and the Solomon Foundation, which is providing matching funding, promises to improve the visitor experience with new facilities while reuniting the Charles River with the Charlesgate neighborhood. These and similar efforts will serve to leverage our existing resources with new, private funding from more than willing partners to improve our parks.
Also in the policy realm, we support the Council’s push to have DCR engage in a comprehensive strategic planning process as recommended by the Legislative Special Commission on DCR’s 2021 report. While DCR responded to this report quickly with a Strategic Readiness Initiative, all parties involved stipulated that this exercise is not a substitute for a strategic plan, which, among other things, will tie staff and funding levels to DCR’s vast holdings and responsibilities.
Finally, we are glad to see the Council examine and contemplate changes to the 2003 enabling legislation, MGL Chapter 21, that created the Stewardship Council as a quasi-board of directors to oversee the then new agency, DCR.
Specifically, we support the Council’s suggestions to cut members’ seven-year terms to five-year terms, and to stagger those terms so that not every council member is subject to gubernatorial replacement at the same time. We agree with the council that the current term length may be a roadblock to recruiting new members to fill vacancies. And we agree that staggering the terms will tend to promote the retention of institutional knowledge as Council members are replaced.
Again, thank you for the opportunity to comment on the Strategic Oversight Plan. As the only statewide non-partisan, non-profit NGO with a primary mission of supporting our state parks and the millions of people who rely on them for their physical and mental well-being, MPA stands ready to work with all stakeholders to make our state parks, and the $16.0 billion annual outdoor economy they support, second to none.
Yours in conservation,
Doug Pizzi
Executive Director
Mass Parks for All