The Ottawa County Parks and Recreation Commission began a strategic planning process earlier this year, where public input was gathered through three separate surveys to guide future initiatives. Out of those three surveys, over 6,000 responses were gathered.
Thursday evening, the commission presented those results to the public.
“Individual projects come up, like we want to build a new park or a new playground or a dog park, off-leash, on-leash, lots of opinions. Winterize bathrooms. Yeah, like, there’s all of those. We think of those as like projects: individual things that would require resources, right? But there’s limited resources, so you have to prioritize those, and what will be prioritized are things that are in alignment with vision, values, and strategic initiatives.”
Survey results also indicated that accessibility, environmental stewardship, and park expansion were important to residents.
“Everything you have now, but more of it and expanding so obviously there’s resources that need to be allocated for those things which will be another challenge to work through.”
Park Planner Aaron Bodbyl-Mast noted the importance tourism plays when it comes to park funding.
“We know that it’s $24 million in tourism dollars a year that we generate, which would be about 5% of the total tourism dollars that is generated by Ottawa County.”
The strategic plan can be viewed online at here and comments may be submitted through June 20th.
You can view the entire presentation here.