 Well good morning. Good morning. I like that. It's Saturday morning. You're giving up your Saturday morning to come listen to and get an update on our process for the park recreation and open space master plan for the city of Fort Worth Parks and Community Services Department. Again, I want to express my appreciation on behalf of our board and our staff for you taking time on the Saturday morning to come down here. Where we are in this process our first master plan and you'll see in a minute was actually 1909 done by Kessler and we've had subsequent plans to that but in 1998 we shifted to a more needs assessment need-based plan to help position us to be able to be competitive primarily for grants both at the state level and the national level and you hear a little bit more about that how we've done that but it also does measures that are based on the National Recreation and Park Association as well as the American Academy for Park and Recreation Administration so it sets standards. It helps us plan better from the standpoint of both taking care of existing infrastructure and addressing growth in the community. It drives policies such as our neighborhood park dedication policy which helps us keep up with growth both in neighborhood parkland and community parkland and I'll just stay on that and that it helped adjust that policy which was actually established in 1978 so that we were not only picking up neighborhood parkland but in 2000 there was a significant change which enabled us to pick up both neighborhood parkland and funds for community parkland and the result of that policy change in 2000 is that in 2010 we were able to assemble enough funding to make a purchase of seven million dollars for a 245 acre community park which is now called Northwest Community Park up at 156 in Harman Road and let me just carry that a little bit further. We used the land value to apply for a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department grant. We received that grant one million dollars that's enabling us to do our first phase development and because of that springboard and the need for based on our needs assessment athletic facilities in that far northern area the recent bond program appropriated 2.6 million for us to do that and we get to fire another bullet in the Parks and Wildlife grant competition and we submitted a grant application this past summer for that same project so we'll know whether we'll receive that grant in January when the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission meets and awards those grants so I just tell you that short story to kind of explain how this whole process helps position us to leverage alternative funding. In the end whatever we do has to be supported by resources and to sustain it and that's something you'll hear me say constantly is whatever you build you've got to take care of and so we want to make sure that we're being good stewards in that regard. Let me make a couple of quick introductions. We have some members of our parks and community services advisory board with us today. Sheila here is back here. She is the chair of the board. Chase Dustin is up here on the front row. He is place 7 and Diane Criswell is in the back and she is place 3 and I'm not sure if we had any other board members show up today. They have worked on this process. We briefed them on September 24 at a work session talked about how we go through the update and talk a lot about trends which you'll see here in a minute in the presentation but this is really a report out and the last thing I'll say is in the 98 process and in the 2004 process again we base our information on our needs assessment and input that we receive through technology and through the board but the staff came to me and said you know the last two times we didn't really do a report out in this process. We think it would be a good idea to do that so hats off to them to take in the initiative to say let's get everybody together and this invitation went out to the League of Neighborhoods but also all of our support groups and people that we work with, the Sports Advisory Council, the Botanical Society, the Fort Worth Garden Club, the Prince of the Nature Center. I could go on. We couldn't do the kinds of things that we do in the Fort Worth park system if it weren't for folks that get involved and help support us in many ways. So with that I'd like to turn this over to Joel McElaney and Joel is the I guess the architect of this process and his staff is here and after this meeting this report out will continue to have an opportunity for folks to provide input and to visit with staff as well. So Joel. Thank you and I echo Richard's sentiments. I greatly appreciate you all taking time out of your weekend, your Saturday to come out here today. Obviously there's a lot of passion for parks and that's good for us because without your passion for parks we wouldn't have a job. So I really appreciate you all coming. What we're going to go through today, our Park Recreation Open Space Master Plan. Richard gave a great description of what it is, how it's used and he even gave a little bit of the history of it. I'm going to repeat a little bit of that and just give that overview of what the master plan is, what some of the inputs are that we consider in making recommendations within the master plan. A little snapshot of demographic change in the population growth we've experienced over the last 15 years. Go through our public input process. We're meeting here today but and there is an online survey available but that's not really the start of our public input process. It started back in 2013 with the needs assessment study and I'm going to go through that. What's happened there today. Next we're going to look at some of the facility standards and I just want to explain how we arrive at standards of parkland to population or athletic fields or other facilities like playgrounds, trails to population. I want to explain where that comes from and we'll look at some of the emerging trends, some of the new park recreation resources that we're seeing out there that people are asking for. It may be in neighboring cities, it may be around the country. And last I'll go through the schedule for the plan from today through when we anticipate bringing this to our city council for adoption. The purpose of the plan, so why do we put time and resources into developing this plan? Richard touched on this a little bit. Basically the master plan, our park recreation open space master plan provides that framework or vision for providing park and recreation resources to our community in the city of Fort Worth. By identifying our needs and prioritizing those needs we can be strategic about putting funding toward future capital improvements. And also our master plan allows us to partner with other organizations in providing those resources. We identify our mission and we can partner with non-profit groups like streams and valleys or friends of groups, you have friends at Tandy Hills, friends of the Fort Worth Nature Center, there's a Botanic Society that's active here at the Botanic Gardens. There's also other public agencies like Tarant Regional Water District or the various independent school districts that we can partner with on projects as well and provide recreational resources to the community. And last, grant applications. Texas Parks and Wildlife, Richard mentioned we've been successful in our applications for Texas Parks and Wildlife grants and since 2010, the last four years, we've applied for four grants and we've been the highest scoring application on all four of those applications, that totaled $3.1 million. And we actually have another application in, Richard mentioned, in late August we submitted another application, a million dollar application for Northwest Community Park up in North Fort Worth and that jury's out on that one yet. We'll find out in January whether or not we received that funding. History of the plan and Richard mentioned the first park master plan, citywide master plan was developed in 1909 by George Kessler. We call it the Kessler plan and the Kessler plan and the subsequent 1930, 1957 higher and higher plans, they really laid out that vision for some of our core parks within the city. The Trinity Park, Foster Park, Cobb Park on the east side, Rock Springs Park, which later changed names to the Fort Worth Botanic Garden, were all included in that plan, many other parks as well. But those sort of those core parts of our system were identified in those master plans. In 1991, the city commission that's first needs assessment study and that was the foundation of the 1992 park and recreation department strategic plan. So from that plan we changed and became more strategic in our citywide master plan for parks. They were always based on a needs assessment. We got that public input before doing the master plan. We identified a mission statement, goals and objectives. We identified needs and we prioritized those needs in all these plans, 92, 98, 2004, the 2010 update and we're following suit today. We did a needs assessment study in 2013 and I'll get in and I'll explain what all went into that and how that was put out there. But that is the foundation for the 2015 master plan. What's all included in the plan? Goals and objectives, I mentioned we have a departmental mission statement, of course it was citywide mission statement. We have a departmental mission statement. We have goals and objectives to help us realize that mission. We identified the plan development process, what all went into this. We identify our park facility standards. I'll talk about those here in a couple slides. We inventory our park facilities. You got to know what you have before you start thinking about what you need. So we include an inventory of our current parks and park facilities. A needs assessment, I mentioned that a couple times now. The 2013 needs assessment and all the public input we received through the 2014 bond program and survey that's available today, that will go into the master plan as well. And last we prioritize those needs based on public input and goals and objectives. Some of these inputs that go into the plan's recommendations include the public input, of course, the staff input. We have people out in the parks every day maintaining parks, working in community centers, managing capital improvement projects, building new park facilities, and administering our park dedication policy. People that are actively working in the parks. So they have input as well that's considered in the plan. We look at trends, nationwide trends and resource park facilities. Some new things that were coming online. I'm going to touch on those at the end of the presentation here. These are things we're seeing in neighboring cities and they're things we're hearing from the public that they want to see here in the city for work. We also consider national standards. As park professionals our national association is the National Recreation and Park Association and or the NRPA. And that group has facility standards that they recommend for level of service of parkland based on population or facilities such as playgrounds, athletic fields, and trails. Facility standards based on population that they recommend at the national level. We of course take into consideration what our own priorities are that we hear from you and what some of our neighboring cities, their level of service. So we take that in consideration and make it fit for the city forward. We have federal mandates in particular the Americans Disabilities Act has requirements on accessibility trails or playgrounds that we have to consider in including recommendations in our master plan and last demographics. And on that I just wanted to highlight this very briefly here. You all may have noticed there's a lot of population going on this growth going on the city forward here. The population hovered around 400,000 for several decades. In 2005 we had a population of 534,000 and currently the estimate is 781,000. So to do the math on that we've added 250,000 people or a quarter million people have been added to the population of the city of Fort Worth. Obviously there's an increase in need for parkland, neighborhood and community parks for these new residents and there's a possibility that our priorities may change. We have a bunch of new opinions with 250,000 people added in. So it's important that we go back and update this plan and identify what those new priorities are. The public input process for the 2015 plan didn't start today with this meeting and it didn't start a few days ago when we got our online survey posted on the city website. It started in 2003 with a needs assessment study. Our department commissioned a professional survey group to conduct this needs assessment study and this group mailed out 20,000 questionnaires throughout the city randomly chosen residents. There was an option of completing it online or mailing the survey back in. The survey then was also posted on the city of Fort Worth website and linked on the Facebook page for the city of Fort Worth and downtown Fort Worth, Inc. And it was also mailed out to the registered neighborhood organizations and that's something I wanted to highlight here that if you're in an HOA, you should really check if your HOA is registered with the city of Fort Worth as a registered neighborhood organization. Michelle Goote at the front is our director of communications. She was just to the right when you walked in the front door there and her group sends out those communication to registered neighborhood groups. If your group is not registered, we don't have your information. We can't get the information out to you so that's important to check on. Next, additional public input was through the 2014 BOM program. You all may have attended. If you took time out of your day here on Saturday, you all may have attended some of the public meetings. We have 31 of them that went into the 2014 BOM program. There was also an opportunity to provide input through the city website. It was yourfortworth.com. That was the link they established for that. So all that public input was documented and this is importantly we identified what meeting that input came from. So if it was a meeting on the east side or north side or south side, that's along with the comments. So we have that data that we can also consider in prioritizing needs. And last we have our survey that's currently posted online. We mirrored the needs assessment questions. And the purpose of this is we're getting the word out there. We're going to move through several steps here before this plan. It goes to city council and we seek their adoption. And I'll go through that process, that schedule at the end. But since we're having this public meeting, we know there's opinions out there and we want to give the people an opportunity to memorialize those comments and opinions in a survey. So we got that online. It was linked last week. We're going to continue to run that for another two weeks after this meeting. So I encourage you all to complete that and also tell your friends, neighbors about it and so they can fill that out as well. Some of the evolving needs we have, I just wanted to highlight here. In 2004, our needs assessment study, the number one identified need on there was restrooms and large parks. And there was some of your other typical facilities like playgrounds and picnic shelters. But in 2013 needs assessment study, the number one was hike and bike trails. Number two is open space. These weren't even in the top five. So they're number one and two now but they weren't back there in 2004. They weren't in that needs assessment in 2004. So that's just a little glimpse of how needs change. The park facility standards. I wanted to go through just some of the contents of the plan and also we'll mention the 2004 plan, the 2010 update are available online on the city website. We have a parks and community services webpage and you can view those documents there. We also put several copies at the front. A little sticker on there, please return to table. That's just because we wanted everybody to be able to see that and if one walks out of the building it's really no big deal but we did want to give everybody the opportunity to take a look at it. Our park facility standards are identified in there. So if you get a chance to go through that plan you can take a look at these. These standards include a ratio of parkland, neighborhood and community parkland based on population. They also include facility standards for other items. I mentioned this before like soccer fields, baseball fields, playgrounds or tennis courts. Those are all population based standards. One of the things we're considering for this year's 2015 plan is some geographic based standards for facilities. For example, a dog park. It may not make sense to have a population based standard for a dog park but it does make sense to provide dog parks throughout the city geographically. We currently have the Fort Wolf dog park in East Fort Worth. It's very popular. We're building our second dog park in North Zebo's Park in West Fort Worth. A geographic based standard to include to provide dog parks in each quadrant of the city is something that we're considering right now. Other classifications you'll see in there are definitions of our park facilities, of our definition of our pocket park, which is a one to five acre park or neighborhood park, five to 20 acres. Community park 20 to 75 acres and then our regional parks are 70 acres plus. An example of a community park would be Gateway Park. That type of park, there's just multiple facilities in there. There's our artificial turf soccer and rugby complex. There's natural surface soccer fields. There's Fort Wolf dog park I mentioned and just several facilities in one park and that moves it to that regional park classification. Community parks typically have athletic fields and their destinations. People drive there. They have a parking lot. It provides a service that you don't find in your neighborhood park. That neighborhood park is where we typically have our playgrounds, picnic shelters, a walking trail. These are typically in the neighborhood. No parking because people walk there. That's anticipated that they would walk to this type of park. The same with the smaller pocket park. That would be one embedded in the neighborhood and people can walk there. We also have special use facilities on here. That would be your singular use type parks like a golf course. One of the changes we're looking at to park classifications we're considering is the addition of green belts. The parks we get outside the loop in developing areas often are adjacent creeks or drainage ways and they become an opportunity to create a linkage between parks with a trail. As we saw in 2014 or 2013 needs assessment, trails were the number one ranked priority. However, there's also that need to provide neighborhood park as well because people want the playground and a space for a practice field and that sort of thing. Having a classification for a green belt is something that we're considering adding to this year's master plan. Other park facility considerations we got to take into account are more dense areas. Fort Worth is a big city and I'll talk about that when I get into defining our park planning districts. We have older infrastructure that's more dense areas that are being revitalized and new growth in the inner city and we have growth in the outer city and the needs in the inner city are going to be different than outside the loop. One of the considerations is how we provide open space in a more dense area where the cost of land is more expensive. The pocket park is defined as a one-acre park. It may be cost-prohibited to acquire one acre in some of these more dense areas, but people that live in those areas still need that close to home park or open space that they can have access to. That's a couple considerations for this 2015 plan, the addition of the green belt, park classification, and how we provide open space in the more dense areas. The park and recreation open space master plan is that framework providing park and recreation resources city-wide, but we're a big city. 349 acres, a population near 800,000. We have new development happening outside the loop. We have redevelopment happening in the inner city in higher density areas, so it's impossible to really create that one-size-fits-all. So we've defined these park planning districts for us to be able to rank priorities specific to geographic area. You can get a closer look at these park planning districts out there on the boards, but just to show you on here, I mean this whole colored map, that's a city of Fort Worth. The park planning districts are around here, one in South Fort Worth, two in West, three is the East Side, four is everything within the loop, and five is North Fort Worth. So just visually, I want to give you that idea. These boundaries do not follow political lines. They don't overlap with council districts. The purpose is meant to be apolitical, but within the master plan, you'll notice that back in 2004 and in the 2010 update, and in the 2015 plan, we ranked priorities based on park planning district. So again, what matters to the people up in park planning district five, what's a high priority up here, may not be the same as what's in the central city or out in East Fort Worth. Priorities may be different. They are different, and that's why we ranked them independently like that. Last, I'll get into just some of the new trends. It's kind of a fun part of the presentation. So what are we seeing? What are we hearing about? What are people asking for? People go to other cities, go to Arlington, Dallas, or they travel across the country, and they come back and say, hey, we got to have that here in Fort Worth. Some of these specialized facilities, Disc Golf, we've seen that for a couple decades now. City now has four Disc Golf courses, but something new is Foot Golf. That's something I just heard about about six months ago. You use a soccer ball instead of a golf ball. Use your foot instead of a golf club, and thankfully they made the cut bigger. So we all had a chance. So Foot Golf is new. We have one football course at Rockwood Golf, or yeah, one course at Rockwood Golf Course. Nancy's nodding, so I know I'm right. So we added that. Another new sport is Futsal, or at least it's new. We're hearing about it more recently. Futsal is similar to soccer. Use a smaller ball. It's played on a hard court. It can be played indoors or outdoors, and it uses smaller goals and a few number of players. So it takes up a smaller footprint, and we now have some people using tennis courts for Futsal courts. And so that's something that's new, and we're hearing more about. Next, the other specialized facilities. Dog parks. I mentioned Fort Wolf a couple times, and we have of course the new dog park at North Zebos and West Fort Worth. It's going to be under construction here. But skate parks is something more relatively new. We have a great new skate park over in the east side in Arlington. You know, it kind of galls me to say it. But we have $600,000 allocated out of a $3.8 million in 2014 bomb program for a skate park facility in South Fort Worth at Chisholm Trail Community Park. So we're hearing that. People are traveling around. They're seeing some great skate park facilities, and they want to see that type of facility here in Fort Worth. We built some smaller skate parks, or we built one, excuse me, at Marine Park in North Fort Worth. This is, could be classified as a skate pocket. That's a smaller, almost like a pocket park, but it's just a smaller skate park facility. But there's a, we're hearing about skate parks all the time. And on this list here, last one is universal playgrounds. All of our parks meet the Americans with Disability Act guidelines or requirements, and they provide a variety of play resources that stimulate different senses. The universal playground does this at a much larger scale, provides those play components that stimulate senses like touch and sound and visual insight. The play components also include ramps that allow access throughout the play structure, typically. So they're a bigger type playground and they become a destination. And that's our first universal playgrounds built back in the early 90s at Patricia LeBlanc Park. The 2014 bond program included funding for the replacement of that playground. Next, the outdoor fitness. We've been using parks for fitness as long as there's been parks, because that was the original purpose of the public park is for to get outside and live a healthy life. But something we're seeing a little more of is organized fitness classes within our parks. We have agreements with several of the boot camp instructors. They lead classes out at Trinity Park and various parks. These are things like CrossFit training. And we have installed fitness equipment, some parks. Rosemount Park is the exercise equipment out there. And that's something we're hearing. There's a need for that. The fixed equipment and also the organized instruction. And the last one I'll talk about for emerging trends is just technology, because it really couldn't get away with talking about an update without talking about changing technology. We used to call it Orienteering and we'd use a compass and we go out to a park and we try to find our way around. Now some of them relatively knew it's been around for ten or plus years is geocaching. People are using a GPS unit to find a note or a hidden treasure that sort of thing out in public parks. A couple more new technology trends are drones, of course in the war effort. That's when we first heard that term. But now you can buy a drone at Walmart or Amazon.com. And we know there are people are, they're going to look to their public park to fly the drone. And that we just have to be conscious of potential conflicts between that and other park uses. And the last apps or phone applications, the picture on the bottom right here is Fresh Kills Park in New York. People, there's so many apps out there, they just expect it now. This app for Fresh Kills New York includes way finding information, interpretive information that people have. So that's something we have to be conscious of that there's going to be interest in that. Okay, as I wrap up here, I'm going to go through the schedule, taking this plan through adoption. We met with our park board in a work session on September 24th and we made a presentation to the Development Advisory Council on October 20th. And the Development, excuse me, the Development Advisory Committee, that group is made up of the developers that are out there building the new housing whether it be revitalizing areas within the city in the more dense type areas or new development, green field development, they call it out in the outlying areas. It's important to get their input because after we, after this plan is adopted, it's the basis for a park dedication policy and that is a policy for providing parkland for future residents as new housing is built whether it be in the central city or out outside the loop. There's a fee that developer pays for neighborhood and for the provision of neighborhood and recreation parkland and park development for the new residents that are going to be living in those homes. The next step after today's meeting is going to be to go back to park board for a work session. We're going to take our public input that we've received to the needs assessment study, the bond program and the survey that we have running right now present that back at the work session and make recommendations for changes, work with our park board and get their input and what changes they recommend as well. And we will go back for a park board action item in December and that would be when we seek the park board's endorsement of the plan. That isn't that both these the work session and the December meeting are both open and the public are welcome to come in the next meeting as well and I'll say that and fill out a comment card. Now the work session, that's when we're working with the park board. Anybody can speak there but it would probably be at the end of the meeting and usually Sheila Hill our chair of the park board will state, you know, she'll explain that at the park board meeting. But at the action item, that's when the public can speak right there, right when it's on the floor for consideration. Also in December, we'll go to our plan commission. Now this park recreation and open space master plan is adopted into the city comprehensive plan by reference. So we need the plan commission's endorsement as well. And that's also a public meeting where the public can speak. And then we go to January. We will seek our city council's adoption of the plan January 15. Again, it is a public meeting. Public is invited to speak. It's not a public hearing, but it is a it's a non consent item. So anybody that wants to speak on it can fill out a comment card and go up and voice their support or concerns at that time. And last, I just wanted to highlight again the public meeting survey that is it's available on our city parks web page. The also the 2004 master plan, the 2010 update in the 2013 needs assessment are also linked here at the same spot. So if you go to city forward website, parks and community services page and then click on master plans at the top. It's a link at the top left of the page there. You have access to all those documents. I put my email address on here. Feel free to contact me. It's also at the top of the blue sheet. So you've already filled out a survey and you just want to take one of those blue sheets for the contact information. Feel free to do that.