“Our parks are incredibly important to the sustainability of the city,” said Fairfield Mayor Steve Miller. “Quality of life is high on our list for folks that live here or come here, and we need to have a parks system to help attract and retain these people.”
The National Recreation and Parks Association shows Fairfield’s population is on par with the average size of its member agencies, but that’s where the comparisons end with an average NRPA agency.
The average parks agency manages 20 parks that comprise 437 acres, but Fairfield manages 28 parks totaling 619 acres, which doesn’t include the nine facilities, like the Community Arts Center, Elisha Morgan Mansion, the two Fairfield Greens clubhouses, and the aquatic center, that sit on a collective 198 acres. It also doesn’t include the 14 miles of trails around the city.
“Even though our agency is very large for a community of our size, we can go toe-to-toe with agencies that serve 60,000, 80,000 residential cities,” said Parks and Recreation Director Tiphanie Mays. “That’s how much we have.”
The parks provide residents an indirect benefit, according to researcher John Crompton. He wrote several papers on the impacts of parks on property values, and concluded that parks have a significant positive effect on parks near homes. However, the caveat is they’re well-maintained and relatively private from passers-by.
Neighborhood parks include Good Neighbors, Lions, Oakwood, Winton Hills and Woodcreek.
Fairfield has one park for every 1,500 residents, a ratio that is closer to smaller agencies.
But the city’s recreation department has its challenges, Mays said. Part of those challenges came because the city’s recreation opportunities grew fast.
Jim Bell retired in April 2018 after 40 years with Fairfield, the last 32 as its second parks and recreation director. The city was just 23 years old in 1978 and leaders focused on growing quality of life amenities, Bell said in a 2018 Journal-News interview.
When Mays came into the city, there was what Bell called “an incredibly ambitious” parks plan for the next decade-plus, which included improvements at Harbin Park.
The total three-phase investment into Harbin Park will end up being between $4.5 million to $5 million, which includes $700,000 in state capital budget funds for a pair of Phase 1 projects.
While the parks department considers trends in the industry and balances that with what residents want in the parks ― trails are the big push now ― Miller said past leaders set the city up for the developments now.
“They amassed a lot of land back then (in the 1970s),” said Miller. “They laid the groundwork for the future by acquiring the properties. They may not have known the full reason, but they knew if they captured that land we could do something with it someday. I think that’s exactly at happened.”
LARGEST PARKS
Here is the list of parks that are 10 acres and greater:
212 acres: William Harbin Park
85 acres: Thomas O. Marsh Park
30 acres: Muskopf Preserve
25 acres: Village Green Hillside Preserve
23 acres: Oakwood Park and Black Bottom Preserve
22 acres: Huffman Park
20 acres: Grange Park
15 acres: Creekside Park
10 acres: Fairfield Youth Football Fields, Fairfield Youth Playfields, Gilbert Farms Park, Hatton Park, Point Pleasant Park, Waterworks Park, Winton Hills Park
PARKS DEPARTMENT INVENTORY
840: Total maintained acres
37: Properties
26: Shelters
20: Diamond fields
18: Basketball courts
15: Playgrounds
15: Rectangle fields
12: Tennis courts
7: Gazebos
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