By now, the Greenbelt Recreation Department had planned to have presented council with a draft Recreation and Parks Master Plan for their review. However, the data gathering portion of the work took longer than expected. The department now expects to present the draft to the city council and the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board (PRAB) within the next few months. Council met with the contractor on May 2 to review the status of the work.
The master plan will serve as a road map for improving the city’s provision of parks and recreation facilities and services. In order to develop this plan, the city’s contractor GreenPlay, LLC undertook a study to identify residents’ wants, needs and levels of satisfaction with current recreational opportunities as well as ideas for improvement. To date, they have mostly worked on information gathering and analysis. They met with stakeholder focus groups and conducted a community survey. While the sample for the study was representative of the population of Greenbelt, the responses were not. The contractor and city staff spent additional time and methods in an attempt to obtain better data.
Roughly 3,000 community surveys were mailed; just 220 were returned. In addition, 283 responses were received via an online survey, which was also available in Spanish, thanks to the translation work of Beverly Palau, the city’s public information and communications coordinator. The total number of surveys completed through both methods was just 503. The responses received through the two surveys were consistent, reported Adam Bossi, project consultant from GreenPlay.
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