Creating Budget-Friendly Sustainability Plans

To limit costs, in-house experts are stepping in to execute green initiatives

By Jefferey Spivey
Photos: Nic Lehoux Photography

Sustainability has become an urgent issue in the nation’s parks departments, as officials manage wildfire-altered landscapes, rising sea levels, and threatened species, among several other issues.

“Climate change is real and is a threat, and we need to be doing everything we can to lessen our environmental burden,” says Chris Lindgren, Superintendent of Parks and Planning at the Park District of Oak Park in Illinois. Lindgren played an integral role in building his department’s official sustainability plan, which went into effect in 2021.

Increasingly, parks leaders around the country are releasing detailed sustainability-action plans to the public, suggesting that every department should be doing the same. But the creation of these plans requires resources—internal talent, external consultants, community activists, appropriate funding, and time allocation. For smaller departments that don’t have the bandwidth, it’s difficult to prioritize sustainability planning while struggling with day-to-day responsibilities.

The Green Team

One possibility is to opt for a less formal approach, focusing on a handful of initiatives instead of investing resources into an official strategy.

“We have done several things related to sustainability, but in all honesty, I don’t think we would call it a formal ‘sustainability plan,’” says David Sadler, Superintendent of Parks for the city of West Des Moines in Iowa.

Sadler’s department has a “Green Team” consisting mainly of internal staff members, along with representatives from the Public Services, Engineering, and Library departments. The team meets monthly to trade ideas about ways the entire organization can operate more sustainably. These efforts have led to a number of initiatives, like the annual Shade Crusade tree-distribution program, in which the department encourages residents to buy and plant new trees, in service of increasing tree diversity and urban tree canopy. Residents pay $30, and the department foots the rest of the bill, ranging from $30 to $90 per tree. In 2021, the department sold 329 units of 12 different tree varieties.

Other initiatives have included a yearly Valley Junction Earth Day event; the Prairie Seed Harvest, during which West Des Moines City staff members harvest seeds from Raccoon River Park to help restore other prairie areas; and the Adult Sports Paperless Goal, a campaign created to reduce the amount of paper that adult-league teams use to promote and market their events.

Despite not having what could be considered a formal plan, Sadler has seen the benefits of the Green Team.

“Just getting together each month to talk about sustainable practices raises the level of awareness, and ultimately how many of these things get done,” he says.

The Ecological System Plan

However, for departments interested in a more conventional sustainability plan but that lacks the capacity, there are ways to pull it together without needing a sizable budget or exhausting human capital.

Start by looking into the ways other parks departments have tackled the issue.

“Anyone looking to create a sustainability plan should reach out to fellow agencies and see what they’ve done as a resource and ask them to share their plan,” Lindgren says.

Then, leaders should be clear on who will be involved and how much money will be spent. For Adam Arvidson, Director of Strategic Planning for the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, this meant enlisting a diverse group of stakeholders and doing as much internally as possible.

“We didn’t hire a consultant to whom we turned over the reins of the project,” he says. “We really led the project in-house.”

Two bodies—the Community Advisory Committee (CAC) and Project Advisory Committee (PAC)—helped form the basis of what became the Ecological System Plan. The CAC was appointed by the board and was comprised of local experts who provided “really learned community perspectives,” Arvidson says. These community advocates helped narrow the scope of the plan to seven, core sustainability guidelines. 

The PAC featured representatives from all 19 of the city’s departments, each nominated by the respective department head.

“We wanted to make sure that there were pieces of it that touched all the different aspects of our organization,” Arvidson says. 

Each representative brought ideas to the table to foster better sustainability in their jurisdiction; however, some members took more active roles in the process by nature of their daily responsibilities. For example, the plan was organized around four principles—air, water, land, and life. Thus, the water-resource representative had a direct connection to a critical focus, whereas the adult sports league representative did not.

Lindgren took a similar all-hands approach, but also suggested engaging local sustainability nonprofits, that could provide critical feedback before goals were finalized.

Budget Considerations  

Concerning a budget, costs can be controlled significantly by first outlining a specific budget and then leaning on in-house expertise. 

Arvidson’s department set a budget of $190,000, but nearly half of that cost was paid by a local watershed organization. The maps that were created as part of the Ecological System Plan provided new information to the organization, like areas of Minneapolis where tree canopy was lacking.

The department also allocated funds from its capital-improvement budget. Because Arvidson’s department was a revenue-based division that bills against projects, the hours that participating employees worked were counted as a part of the project’s total spend.

“We kind of, in a way, paid ourselves to be the consultants,” Arvidson says.

The only external hires were an ecological engineering and mapping consultant and a graphic-design consultant, both of whom stepped in to provide skillsets the department lacked.

If hiring out isn’t an option, Lindgren advises leaders to do what they can with what they have.

“I wish I had the money to pay designers to make it look a bit nicer,” he says. “If you have someone on staff with that expertise, I recommend bringing them in at the end to make it look nice.”

Finding Focus

After finalizing the budget and the dedicated team, focus on the content of the plan. Sustainability is a broad term that can potentially cover dozens of areas. Rather than be overwhelmed by the magnitude of possibilities, leaders should start by focusing on immediate duties.

“You look at what you’re responsible for in your agency,” Lindgren says. This is also where other plans come into play. They provide examples of the categories that other departments are focusing on.

“See what categories cover everything that you need, so you can make an impact in each of those areas,” he adds. 

The Park District of Oak Park’s Sustainability Plan covers energy conservation, water conservation and management, fleet management, acquisition and use of supplies, recycling and solid-waste management, infrastructure, natural resources, and wellness.

Minneapolis’ Ecological System Plan focuses on carbon sequestration, the urban heat-island effect, air-quality issues, habitat connectivity, biodiversity and habitat quality, stormwater runoff, and sustainable-energy generation. 

There are certain categories, like energy use, that will be present in most plans, but what’s critical is personalizing the plan to the needs of the community. Not every city will have the same problems with energy, nor the same capabilities to mitigate those problems.

A Roadmap To Success

Beyond the content, accountability matters, too. Lindgren’s plan covers only a two-year period, lasting until 2023. The goal was to ensure that the plan remained active and was reviewed often.

Arvidson’s department addressed this by assigning Plan Champions to each initiative. These Champions are tasked with providing annual updates on what has been accomplished, and what still needs to be done. The department is also preparing to roll out a system that tracks all initiatives from the plan with achievable metrics. Arvidson stresses that the Ecological System Plan was more a roadmap to achieving sustainability versus a commitment to specific reduction targets. With a community that’s passionate about environmental concerns, he worried that the targets—and not the actions—would have caused debate and slowed progress on the plan.

But he shared that the community has embraced this approach and stuck by the department, even as the plan has been delayed. Initial work began in 2015; the plan wasn’t adopted until 2020. Arvidson urges departments to accept these bumps in the road as they build their plans, especially if team members are balancing the plan with more immediate duties. 

Arvidson says, “It’s okay to start, and if you’ve got to pump the brakes or take your foot off the accelerator and downshift for a little while, that’s okay, too.”

Jefferey Spivey is a writer based in Urbandale, Iowa. Reach him at jeffereyspivey@gmail.com.