Greensboro Plan2Play Parks and Recreation Master Plan 2019

70 - FEBRUARY 2019

Maintenance and Operations Benchmarking An analysis of maintenance and operations

Compared with peer cities, Greensboro’s parkland to city area ratio is below average; however, it is within the average for acres per 1,000 residents. The number of full- time equivalent employees in Greensboro is nearly 25% lower than the average; however, the average is somewhat inflated by several cities with very large workforces. Based on the peer cities review, Greensboro lags behind in capital funding per resident. Using peer city average allocation of $17.74 per resident, a long- term goal would be an annual capital budget allocation $5.15M. (Figure based on 290,222 residents.) There are two types of capital funding: deferred maintenance spending and capital improvement projects. Deferred maintenance spending cover small projects that are a result of maintenance backlog, this may include: roof repair at the Recreation Center, play equipment,

bench repair and replacement. Capital improvement projects are much larger scale projects, such as those covered by the Capital Improvements Program (CIP) through the issuance of bonds, this includes: land acquisition, and building new infrastructure. If the target goal for capital spending is $5.15 million annually, the Department should allocate an average of $2 - 2.5 million annually towards tackling deferred maintenance before facilities need a larger capital improvement. (This would be in additions to the capital spending.) Below is a recommended timeline to reach the $5.15 million goal. • $5 per resident, or $1,451,110 by Year 5 • $10 per resident, or $2,902,220 by Year 10 • $17.74 per resident, or $5,148,538 by Year 15

practices was used to identify gaps in current service delivery and to provide recommendations for the use of existing resources for the Department. The analysis reviewed the same peer cities as identified in the earlier section of this report, Parks Today: National and Peer Comparisons . Additional information related to this topic is also available in the Appendix C - Greensboro Operations and Maintenance Plan . Although both Greensboro and Arlington have similar populations (290,222 and 227,499, respectively), Greensboro has approximately 80,844 acres of city area, while Arlington has only 15,878 acres. Greensboro has an annual budget of approximately $18 million, Arlington has a budget of nearly $56 million. Because Arlington was such an outlier, the city was not included as part of the maintenance benchmarking analysis.