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- The future of parks in Memphis tonight on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I'm Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian, thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by Nick Walker Director of the Memphis Parks Division.

Nick, thanks for being here.

- Thanks for having me.

- Along with Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian.

Nick, I mean, we'll talk you have been in this role for one year as the interim parks director, and then coming up on another year as the appointed parks director.

There is a master plan for the parks in Memphis and we'll talk through what that means and what's in there.

But I wanna even start before that with just this last year of COVID, which we are not fully out of but we are emerging out of.

What did you see and learn about Memphis' parks in this last extraordinary year?

- No it was incredibly encouraging.

Not necessarily from a public health standpoint or economy or any of that fun stuff, but as a parks director to know that the things that we do on a day-to-day basis matter.

And the way that we know that they matter is quantifiable evidence that parks serve as a place of solace, as a place that people could go.

I've used the number and I've heard varying extents of it anywhere from 40% to 80% increase in park usage.

And that's all a testament to the fact that outdoors has become a place where people feel safe in this pandemic era.

But also it's a testament to the fact that we take care of our stuff.

I don't care if people feel safe there or not if the parks weren't well maintained and well kept after they wouldn't go.

But we've seen that evidence that that's where people want to be right now.

- And do you see that usage of the parks continuing?

I mean, do you have any, I mean no one knows it's just a crazy time but do you think that has introduced people to the parks in a new way that will continue post-COVID?

- I think when you hear folks like Mitchell Silver now about to be outgoing parks director in New York who has a long historical view.

If you look at the times in our society of pandemic and the transformative effects they had on the outdoors there is reason to believe that this is not just a blip.

This is not just a matter of convenience that when folks reacquaint themselves with the outdoors it becomes a generational thing.

- Yeah.

Let me go through some of, as we kinda segue into the parks master plan and funding of it and how that all came about and so on.

Just a sense of the scale which even as prepping for the show I was not fully aware of the scale of the parks system.

So 200,000 in a normal year, 200,000 visitors to the parks.

You've got something like 200,000 youths who are in various athletic programs, 140,000 golfers every year across the various golf courses, there are 164 parks, I had no idea, of which about 117 are developed.

That's about almost, 5,600 acres, thirty public community centers, five senior centers, a special needs center, 14 aquatics or 17 aquatic centers including four that are indoors, the seven golf courses two skate parks, and a whole lot of ball fields.

What did I leave out in terms of giving people a sense of the scale?

And then let's talk about the master plan and what you need and want to get done?

- Well, the only things you really left out are that we also oversee management agreements with the Memphis Zoological Society.

The Zoo is technically mine, the Botanic Gardens, the Brooks Museum, your former oversight group, the Overton Park Conservancy.

- Never heard of them.

- Never heard of them?

No involvement at all?

- No.

Nope, nope.

I was never board chair or board member.

- The Memphis River Parks partnership.

I mean, so it is, what is most fascinating about all that as you went through there if you read the master plan and look at us compared to national averages and recommendations by folks involved in this field, it's not enough.

When I first started in this division my first thought was, man, when I heard those numbers, I was sort of shell-shocked as well.

But for a town of 650,000 people it covers the square acreage that we cover.

We don't have enough green space.

We don't have enough trails.

We don't have enough splash pads.

We don't have enough athletic facilities.

Now is that something I can just snap my fingers and immediately resolve those things?

No because we have funding issues as well.

But it is, those are the two takeaways for me is one it's a lot of stuff, it's not enough.

And two the diversity of things that we have is actually something to be proud of.

- Let me bring in Bill.

- Nick you talked to the City Council as we record this, I think earlier in this week about something that is going to be new and is kind of a sign of the trend we've seen of people using parks more.

And that is a park rangers program that is really not the national park service model but it's also not just a police officer or someone with law enforcement abilities to write tickets.

It's somewhere in between that.

Talk about what prompted that and what you want to do with that.

- Ironically, the prompt for this shortly after, there were two things when I first started in parks that were sort of in my, as deputy, in my realm.

The first was our involvement in the creation of the healthy places, Blue Cross Blue Shield Park at David Carnes which is a mouthful to say, but that's what shows up on Google.

The $5 million park in Whitehaven.

The second was the master plan.

I helped issue the RFP for it and sort of saw it through the entire process.

But the park itself really drove the impetus.

And it is evident, when I have these conversations with Jen Andrews at Shelby Farms.

And I have these conversations with Carol Coletta at MRPP and Tina Sullivan at the Conservancy, Overton Park.

When you make improvements, when you make vast improvements and you bring people in, there needs to be not, you've activated the space.

And when you activate the space you have a responsibility for programming the space.

And there's one or two ways that you do that either through an interpretive park ranger, national park ranger style programming or through more of an operational let's make sure all the trash cans are emptied and have people coming through there and make sure everybody's parking correctly sort of format.

To me we needed a balance of those two things.

And that's something I noticed day one from David Carnes park opening with folks lining the streets with cars sometimes just stopping their car in the middle of the street and getting out and going in almost alá 201 Poplar scenario.

And that's where the analogy ends there, but it was evident that we needed some way of overseeing it.

So we, the Play Your Park staff that we also instituted at the beginning of the Strickland administration.

We dedicated some of our folks from that to paying attention, to going there, to keep things running smoothly.

And then that got me thinking, why don't we do this system-wide?

I hear from council members this park doesn't feel safe.

There's bad elements hanging out at night whatever it may be.

How do we find a way to get there using park rangers?

And we did a lot of research, a lot of study, made a lot of phone calls and this proposal for a pilot of it is sort of the first step toward having that balance again.

- So you've got, I think a group of five full-time park rangers that are a part of this pilot program, but you've also got a larger group of part-time parks' employees who will kind of be the eyes and ears to get to as many places as you need to be.

And just kind of monitor how things are going in a lot of parks, right?

- Yeah.

I mean, a lot of it is still to be determined.

I will say that I joke with Chief McGowan and the mayor a lot of times I feel like the dog who caught the car and that's in a lot of these things.

It is with Accelerate Memphis and the funding that we're seeing, that's gonna transformatively shape the parks of the city.

And it's with this.

We knew on paper what we want this to look like now we need to execute it.

But yeah, the things that we will need to do is find that balancing act that I talked about because there's some operational things.

We rent somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 to 50 pavilions throughout the city, so that people can be guaranteed that they can have their birthday party or anniversary party or whatever at that facility.

Having the ability to go by and make sure that it's cleaned and ready to go is something that I don't have the capacity for today but will this fall in part because of this.

Additionally the ability to enforce the city ordinance that says that park hours end at sunset.

We'll have the ability to cruise the park one last time and make sure that folks are heading home.

It is going to be a developing process.

I'm kind of glad that we're taking the pilot approach because we're gonna be doing this with essentially four supervisors who will each oversee a zone in the city and that'll be their full-time job.

They're gonna be working managers unlike my original proposal where they would be more back of house type stuff, but they're going to be working.

They're going to be driving and patrolling.

And then we're going to use part-time staff who we will make sure go through some extensive training to fill out the program.

- Yeah and let me say, I should probably note also at we are pre-recording this about nine days before it airs and we are in budget season.

And so by the time this airs Nick could have 20 park rangers in many pilot projects, who knows or it could go the other way, but I should mention that.

You mentioned Accelerate Memphis which is a big, we'll talk about that in a second but just again back to the sort of scale of the parks I think your operating budget is right around $35 million.

That's the annual budget city maintenance people, et cetera, et cetera.

Then you've got a capital budget for improvements that I think over the last three years has varied from 4 million to 9 million in 2019 or 2020 I think.

You all have identified about 40 million in deferred maintenance I think across, that could be a murky number.

But the Accelerate Memphis is a proposal that the mayor brought forward and has been approved by Council, had to go to the state where without getting too in the weeds, but it is worth noting.

The city of Memphis five years from now will see a massive reduction in its debt payments.

Some $63 million a year in debt payments will roll off the books.

The city had the opportunity to go ahead and finance 200 million in new debt that it does not have to start paying on for five years.

We talked to Shirley Ford, the CFO for the city, as well as Worth Morgan, the budget chair for the City Council about this last week.

And it creates this $200 million that is at very low interest rates, that is a basically $12 million a year once the city has start paying it.

So you go from 63 million, you replace that with 12 million give or take that's the math.

A big bunch of that is earmarked for the parks.

What will you do, how much are you getting out of Accelerate Memphis, do you think?

And what talk more specifically about some of the projects and improvements and deferred maintenance you're gonna tackle.

- So you did a really good job of explaining it first of all so kudos there.

I will make one clarification.

You said that we have about $40 million in deferred maintenance that's we've identified to repair with Accelerate Memphis.

Truth be told we've estimated the numbers anywhere between 100 and $200 million in deferred maintenance.

And a large part of that is, to use the home remodeler analogy it's behind the walls stuff.

It is electrical, it is plumbing.

It is things that improve the quality of the facility, but don't always, aren't really sexy.

And so I remember when former deputy COO, Kyle Veazey first came to me and started talking about this.

And his first question was, "Hey what would you do with $40 million?"

And it felt like one of those, what would you do if you won a scratch off and could live in Barbados?

And so I said, I would honestly split it about two-thirds deferred maintenance, one-third new shiny stuff.

And more or less as the numbers shifted throughout this conversation that's what we stuck with.

And it's not just my gut feeling.

That is what the National Recreation Parks Association generally recommends for large capital projects.

Is that in situations in which you do not have a long-term well-funded property maintenance program that about two thirds of your capital expenses go toward fixing the things you have.

And then about one third are split between building new things and setting aside funding to make sure you can maintain them.

And so that's where we are.

In terms of the big new stuff is really gonna be Gaisman, Pine Hill, Gaston is going to see a major remodel.

That's the historic community center down on 3rd Street and the River View Community Center down in the Westwood neighborhood.

Those are the centers that are gonna see big change.

The thing about Gaisman is that it is an entire site transformation because we're also building soccer fields at the park itself.

And that's been something that's been for me and for anyone that lives in Memphis is aware the demographics of the city are shifting in an important way that we need to recognize which is a growth of need for soccer facilities.

I mean that's just the truth.

And so improving the facilities that we have at Walter Mae off of Quince, off of 385 which was at one point kind of the crown jewel of our sports complexes.

I mean there were 12 soccer fields out there.

And creating true permittable playable soccer fields at Gaisman are two things that I find fascinating.

To me though the one that, I'm a golfer.

And so Pine Hill to me is gonna be transformative for the Alice neighborhood.

- Two kind of interrelated questions.

How did we get to this place where we had this upwards of $100 million in deferred maintenance, where the soccer field off Quince was the crown jewel and then wasn't, I mean what, and then how do you prevent, you're getting this money right from the Accelerate Memphis but then there's operating, then there's upkeep, then there's all those new shiny things need maintenance on an ongoing basis, all of these facilities need mowing and maintenance and painting and new roofs, the not shiny stuff.

So how do we get there and how do we prevent it from happening again?

- The how we get there, or how we got there is that's more of a chapter than a couple of pages but I will tell you the gist of it is after the dissolution of the Memphis Parks Commission in the early 2000s and shortly up to it because if I can read the tea leaves correctly the city was making a shift away.

In 1978 I want to say, or 1972, I apologize, we won the gold medal award from the National Recreation and Parks Association as the best large park system in the US.

By 2000 that parks commission had been dissolved.

And so there was a shift and I don't know all the things that went into it.

That's much, Bill's a big fan of historical context.

I'm sure he can probably research it, but we just as a city shifted away from prioritizing parks.

And that disinvestment continued for another 20 years.

And I don't say that because I didn't have to deal with all the things that the city had to deal with as the population shifted out east, outside of the city, as we tried to follow it with annexation all those things combined to the point where dramatic underspending on maintaining things led us to this point.

That and just, it's the same thing with roads.

And you would hear Robert Knecht talk about this as well.

We kept adding roads that we had to maintain.

We didn't necessarily have the revenue to be able to maintain them.

- So again, going, and then I'll go to Bill, how do we not let that happen again?

- We have to make a conscious towards, and this is something that I've been pushing, and you may have heard me say this, and I will continue to say it.

Parks needs to find a dedicated funding source.

There needs to be an honest conversation about how do we set a realistic budget, which national averages would tell you.

So I'm at $36 million.

We'll do some quick math here, I know everybody loves that $36 million, but you back out the $6 million, which is the Liberty Bowl that puts me down to $30 million.

You then take out the money that is used to pay my management fee with the Zoological Society, the Brooks, the Botanic Gardens, and look at what is actually dedicated to taking care of parks.

And it's around 24 to $25 million.

The NRPA average is around $80 combined capital and operating per citizen.

So realistically, my combined operating and capital on average nationally would be much closer to $50 million a year.

And as you pointed out, even in the best year, we were at about 45 and that's with $10 million in management fees tacked on there.

So how do we bridge that gap to get us to the national average?

And that is a longer conversation.

It is an Accelerate Memphis type conversation, but in terms of dedicated funding.

And that's what we need to be having a conversation about.

- Bill.

- And Nick on the Politics Podcast a while back, we talked about this in some greater detail.

And one of the options on this is a pretty selective use of user fees for certain activities.

Where is that discussion since we last talked about it?

- Well just in I think the phrasing I used when you and I talked about it was that we would have to be selective with it and we would have to treat it very similar to the Park Rangers Program.

We'd have to pilot it and then see how it goes.

The good news is that there has to be a multitude of ways that we solve this issue.

And that's one of them, others are dedicated funding sources.

And the first thing that everybody comes to their mind is taxation.

But there are other creative ways to do this.

Other cities have figured this out.

Some of them are HCD-type initiatives where there is a leased property with the revenue coming back to parks.

I mean, there's a whole section at the end of the book you kind of went through it at the end of the master plan but one of them is earned income.

I think you've seen at the golf courses that the ability to capture revenue and put it back into the program has led to the point where our golf courses are beautiful and they are well maintained.

And part of that is because they generate revenue.

Should that be every facility?

No, I don't believe that we should operate like the Germantown Athletic Club.

I mean, I'm not disparaging Germantown but that's a different demographic and it's a different reality.

But should we look at using revenue to help us put in some nicer amenities at some of our facilities?

Yes.

I think that's realistic.

- Talk about the impact of having private donors, who agreed to come in and do the overhaul of the Overton Park golf course.

What kind of momentum, if you will has that created around the other golf courses and possibly doing something like that there?

- It's certainly led everyone to think that it's the solution now.

I mean, and I joke about that.

I very much enjoy the relationship that we have with the group of funders that came in.

It's interesting because everyone assumes anyone who's never dealt with funders on a one-on-one basis sees the money and goes, man, that's great.

That's awesome.

Let's do more of that.

Anyone who has knows it's more complicated than that.

And I'm, and so what I am saying is it's a balancing act and the city always has to be careful.

The good news is our north star is always the same.

Does this benefit the people of Memphis?

Does this benefit all the people of Memphis?

And as long as the answer to that question is yes then we'll figure out a way to make it work.

- You know, again, we joked early on about being I am a former board chair, a board member of the Overton Park Conservancy and I had many people over the years when I was doing that come to me and say, oh, we've got this park.

And we just want to form a Conservancy and then that'll take care of itself.

And in the Overton Park Conservancy and the relationship with the the zoo managing the zoo in partnership with the city and there's great benefits to that but it is so much more complicated and it is not in and of itself, hey, you form a nonprofit or conservancy and the money comes pouring in.

I mean it's a potentially good way to do things, but it's gotta be looked at very carefully and selectively.

It's just my little speech of the day having lived that for so long.

But to that end, do you see an opportunity for maybe not on the scale of a park as big as OPC or the riverfront or something as iconic and as important as the zoo, but are there other opportunities for neighborhood partnerships whether that's a conservancy, that's a group that's just helping take over maintenance or supplement maintenance?

I mean, are there public, private partnerships that on a smaller scale that could help with some of this need?

- Yeah.

And I will give a shout out to a group that is still trying to find its space in that but I think will be an important part of this conversation for a long time, which is Bloom.

It's a nonprofit created I believe that they're in the process of looking for a new executive director.

But essentially to serve as an advocacy and organizational group for friends of the parks.

And I think that if you look at Park Pride in Atlanta and various advocacy groups throughout the US based around formalizing those friends-of groups, finding a way to get funding and push that back into the park system, that's the model.

And I think that I will advocate for that strongly.

Conservancy is a very specific tool.

It's a big tool and it should be used in selective instances.

Friends-of and advocacy groups, all day everyday.

- Yeah.

With just a minute left here, the status, I mean Overton Park is under a lot of change going on.

A lot of new things, all kinds of things going on.

Status one of parking on the Greensward and there was then gonna be a garage built over on so that there was no encroachment on the Greensward.

I really don't know, this is not a quite question 'cause I'm out of it now.

Where does that stand post-pandemic, or almost post-pandemic?

- And this is one of those I get to defer to my bosses.

Because this was originally a metaphor of an empty district.

So your question, I will tell you this though and it is a fascinating anecdote and having conversations with the folks at the zoo right now they have not throughout the pandemic used the Greensward as parking and as of a conversation with them yesterday right now they don't need to.

And it is interesting.

A lot of that is the Prentiss lot that was re-striped and filled out.

And a lot of it is the pandemic.

But I would say to be determined and-- - Okay.

- I'm as curious as you are, because I think that that is a long-term solution that we're moving toward.

- And then very briefly, what's the status of the Brooks Museum which is moving downtown in some years?

- Even better an I don't get to answer that one.

I know that there are still conversations around the funding and the timeline on that.

I do know that at some point we'll get to figure out what goes up in its old spot but the good news is we got its neighbor taking care of with the Melodies.

- Yeah going into MCA.

Okay Nick Walker thank you so much.

That is all the time we have this week.

Remember you can get past episodes of the show at the WKNO website or you can download the full podcast of the show wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks and we'll see you next week.

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