The Grand Junction City Council wants more people, including youth and non-English speakers, to be involved with developing its Parks and Recreation Master Plan.
At a work session Monday representatives of Greenplay, LLC, a consulting company hired by the city to help develop the plan, gave a presentation on the planning process. It is kicking off this week with two public forums, as well as several focus group discussions.
“One of the big things at Greenplay we hang our hats on is not putting a pie in the sky wish list together,” Pat O’Toole with Greenplay said. “It’s looking at your resources, maybe stretching them a little bit, but what are you capable of doing so this becomes a living breathing document.”
The City Council was asked for feedback on the planning process and what kind of needs it thought the city had for its parks system. Council Member Anna Stout said young people needed to be engaged in the process.
“If we’re making a plan that’s a ten-year plan, we’ve got young people who are going to be raising children here in the middle of that ten-year plan,” Stout said. “We need to go into the high schools and talk to them because if we want them to stay we want them to be participating in the planning of this community.”
There are youth representatives on the Master Plan Task Force, but Parks and Recreation Director Ken Sherbenou said youth weren’t being specifically targeted for a focus group this week. He said the department could schedule one with local young people for a future focus group.
Stout also questioned whether any effort was being made to reach the city’s Spanish speaking population.
“We had some scope for engagement to the Spanish speaking population specifically, but it was outside of the budget,” Sherbenou said.
Sherbenou suggested that some money being used for online engagement could be shifted to pay for outreach to the Spanish speaking community. Stout said the online engagement could leave important groups out of the discussion.
“I don’t know that we get an A+ for engaging all of our community pre-pandemic,” Stout said. “So I’m really concerned right now. Not all of our senior population is very technologically plugged in. Not all of our lower socioeconomic strata has access to this kind of thing.”
Council Member Phyllis Norris agreed with Stout that more effort should be made to engage with minority communities. She noted that members of the Parks and Recreation Master Plan Task Force speak Spanish and could help with that.
Several council members said they continue to hear calls for a community center in Grand Junction.
They said they hoped through this process that they could get a sense of the types of amenities the community wants in a community center. Mayor Duke Wortmann noted issues with pools in particular due to expansive soils. He mentioned ongoing maintenance issues with the city’s existing pools.
