Government Summit III

Government Summit is tonight.

It has been nearly 6 months since the first Government Summit and our Parks subcommittee reported back to the Summit leaders our progress and made our recommendation which is to pursue the option of consolidating. We have met nearly weekly all summer long and have come to the conclusion that a Metropolitan Parks District is probably the best option. Since the devil is in the details, we would like to explore this more thoroughly and report back with a plan. Whatever we do will take another year to 18 months before it’s ready to bring to the voters. Most of the people on the committee think that a Metropolitan Parks District is a great way to go, except the largest city which already has a very good parks system (actually they are one of top small town parks and recreation programs in country) and they don’t want lose anything (which is reasonable) but they have the most voters. So we have to devise a way that it is beneficial to the most people in the county and provides each community with as much of their own autonomy as possible. (There’s too much civic pride to truly consolidate into one big parks system.) It’s not insurmountable, but requires quite a bit of finesse and figuring out how to make it work. However we structure this, the overall agreement/financing must be approved by the voters and the largest block of voters that are sympathetic to parks is in Longview. And so we dance….