Open Space Advisory Board Agenda and Packet 2017 02 08

Home Browse Search

Open Space Advisory Board Minutes January 11th 2016 Page 4 of 6 budget into "subprograms." Ember went through each of the subprograms to introduce them to the board and hear the board's feedback. One subprogram was "trail maintenance." Included in this budget, City Council indicated that they would like OSAB to evaluate trail maintenance for the City. This will need to be a discussion item in a future meeting. Laura commented that PPLAB encountered some difficulties when they set up a similar exercise for evaluating park maintenance. She added that there can be huge variation in perceived maintenance from month to month and it may need to be more holistic than a single snapshot in order to be fair. Jim agreed that there could be large seasonal differences. Laura asked Ember whether staff has their own maintenance rating criteria in-house. Ember replied that they do and Laura asked her to share the staff's rubric, to provide OSAB with a starting point for this new initiative. Graeme cautioned that the board shouldn't overthink it. Fiona mentioned that she has experience making data forms and organizing data. Helen pointed out that the new budget is asking for an average price per wayfinding sign and this seemed strange: some few signs are much more expensive but also rare, others are much, much less expensive but more common. Taking an average to express such a skewed distribution could only be misleading. She suggested that OSAB may want to push back on reporting sign costs that way. Another subprogram was acquisition. Ember showed how Council wants to discuss and vote on OSAB's acquisition property ranking document. In the Education & Outreach subprogram, Council wants to institute a program of generating user satisfaction scores for every education program, probably in the form of satisfaction scorecards. In the Administrative/Operation subprogram, Council asked for Open Space staff to determine what percentage of open space properties were "designated" as Open Space and what percentage were "zoned" as open space. The City Charter specifies that OSAB has the purview to look at city -owned land and to vote to designate it as either Open Space or not. Council wants OSAB to complete this process for any currently undesignated land. The board expressed some confusion over this, but a willingness to comply. In the New Trails sub -program Council expressed that it wants chances for the public to provide input on new trails. This could be addressed by periodically including trails as a discussion item on OSAB meeting agendas. Helen expressed concern that Open Space and Park's budgets will be again, commingled by this new accounting strategy after OSAB worked so hard to advocate for their budgetary separation and transparency in how the Open Space/Parks Fund is spent. Helen asked for a future discussion item have a City finance person further explain the new accounting system to the board. Ember thought that Finance would be able to separate out Open Space expenditures from Parks. XII. Discussion Item: Draft 2017 Goals— Helen put the accomplishments spreadsheet back up. She asked the board if they would like to change the categories, and suggested bundling the goals of the "other" category into the priority categories. Helen asked if the board would like to 6