LAWTON — The Lawton City Council recently took the first step toward reducing the city’s inventory of parkland.
The council voted unanimously July 11 to declare 10 parks as surplus city property, clearing the way for the city to close the parks or sell them. Ward 7 Councilwoman Onreka Johnson was absent, so the council delayed action on the parks in her ward.
City staff spent several months compiling a list of parks that could be declared surplus, after the consulting firm Halff and Associates conducted an in-depth study of the city’s 72 parks. The study, which found that the city did not have enough employees to maintain every park properly, recommended closing some parks so staff could focus on maintaining the remaining ones.
The average ratio of park maintenance employees to residents is 8.2 full-time staffers for every 10,000 residents, according to the National Recreation and Parks Association, said Parks and Recreation Director Christine James.
“The City of Lawton currently has 3.6 full-time workers per 10,000 residents,” she said. “So if you take the 77,000 approximate population of the city of Lawton times the national average of 8.2 employees, they (Halff and Associates) recommend that the City of Lawton have 63 employees for Parks and Rec.”
James said her department has only 34 employees, leaving the city 29 staffers short of the recommended level.
To solve the problem, Halff recommended shedding some parks, making it easier for existing staff to maintain the remaining parks. Armed with that information, Parks and Recreation asked Lawton residents which parks should remain open and which ones should close.
“Through the whole process of public meetings, meeting with council members for the last almost a year – or a little over a year – we’ve come up with the list that we have today of reducing the park acreage by a total of 52.4 acres,” James said.
‘We’ve tweaked this list’
Following James’ presentation, Mayor Stan Booker wondered how the Parks and Recreation Department had decided which parks should close.
“I haven’t really paid much attention to Ward 1 parks, because I haven’t received any calls on them,” he said. “But some of the others, it was like it was the only park in a neighborhood and – I would have to say a lower middle-class neighborhood – and we’re recommending closing it.”
James said the original list came from Halff’s master plan for parks. Her department researched the parks on the first list and discovered that the city could not close some parks due to property restrictions.
Staffers revised the list to reflect those restrictions, then reworked it again to include recommendations from council members and Lawton residents.
“We’ve tweaked this list several times to get down to here, and we’ve addressed all the issues from the residents – most of them – that have come out to get to the list that we have today,” James said. “So hopefully, we’ve recommended not to eliminate some of those parks that are highly used in some of those neighborhoods.”