On the County Park website.

If you would like yet more information about the Strategic Plan or wish to be added to the mailing list for Steering Committee meetings or other related Strategic Plan events, please contact:

Jane Mark
County Parks and Recreation Department
(408) 355-2237

or via EMAIL at: jane.mark@mail.prk.co.santa-clara.ca.us

The Strategic Plan is intended to incorporate many of the existing plans and policies about parks adopted by the Board of Supervisors rather than revisit them. For example, trail planning will not be a major focus of the Strategic Plan since a comprehensive Countywide Trails Master Plan Update was adopted in 1995. However, the Strategic Plan will also provide the opportunity to reexamine older plans and policies that should be updated.

The Strategic Plan will be prepared in three steps:

Step 1: Visioning - to define overall goals and images for parks and recreation within the County and a specific view about the role of the County Parks and Recreation Department.

Step 2: Painting the Picture - to define specific goals, objectives, policies, and action steps for a series of Strategic Plan elements. This step will characterize the strategies for implementing the vision for regional parks and recreation in the County. For each of the following topic areas, the questions of why, what, who, and where will be addressed. Plan elements include:

• Systemwide Policies and Strategies (General Plan policy revisions)
• Program Policies and Strategies
• Parkland Classification System
• Acquisition Plan (countywide framework and specific park expansions)
• Trails Plan (generally limited to review of priority trail projects)
• Capital Improvement Program
• Operations / Maintenance Plan
• Recreation Plan
• Natural Resource Management Plan
• Interpretive Plan
• Marketing / Customer Service
• Staffing / Organizational Plan
• Concessions / Leasing Plan
• Partnership Plan
• Financing Plan

Step 3: Implementation Actions - to characterize strategies for when and how much funding will be necessary to make the Strategic Plan become a reality.

The Santa Clara County Parks and Recreation Department has been in existence since 1956 and since its inception has grown from 4 parks to a 45,000-acre system including 27 parks and encompassing a variety of urban and rural recreational amenities. For more than four decades, the County has focused on purchasing parkland and developing a network of regional parks and trails along the hillsides adjacent to the urban fringe and along the creeks that pass through the County's urban areas. This "necklace of parks" concept was put into place in the early 1960's and has guided park acquisition and development ever since the vision was adopted as the Regional Parks, Trails, and Scenic Highways element of the Santa Clara County General Plan.

However, without a long-term strategy for parks, the Department will tend to base decisions about how it continues to obtain, plan, program, operate, and maintain parks on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes this involves inefficiencies and sometimes such an approach is not in the long-term best interest of the Department's mission.

By the year 2020, Santa Clara County will have approximately 2.1 million residents. It is the desire of the Santa Clara County Parks and Recreation Commission and the Santa Clara County Parks and Recreation Department to develop a comprehensive Strategic Plan to address the public recreation needs of a diverse county population and to guide the expansion, development, and operations of the parks system for the next 5 to 20 years.