Second in a series

Boston is home to the oldest park in the country, so perhaps it’s no surprise that innovation may not be the first thing that comes to mind when considering the city’s parks and open spaces. Yet with all the talk of innovation in this election season, Boston needs to catch up with other cities in creating and caring for its open space. New York has the High Line, Pittsburgh has summer movies twice a week in all the major parks, and our neighbors Brookline and Cambridge have websites that offer park users many online resources. Beautiful city parks often share a cultural status with great museums. How can Boston’s new mayor help us keep pace?

• Create new parks, playgrounds, and community gardens on city-owned lots across the city, especially along the new Fairmount corridor. Community activists argue for a balance between affordable housing, commercial use, and open space. Imagine creative spaces like the High Line, designed by neighborhood artists, or green plazas with Adirondack chairs like the quads at Northeastern University. The demand for community garden plots far exceeds availability. New gardens are needed, especially in underserved neighborhoods.

• Develop a 21st century webpage and apps for open space. Establish online permitting, real-time park calendars, and a compendium of open space resources. This approach offers much needed transparency, increases access, and entices residents, as well as tourists, to use our much-touted emerald spaces. At the very least, add a parks option to Citizens Connect, the city’s smartphone app for reporting service complaints.

• Enliven city parks with vendors, programs, and community events. Summer park concerts like Jazz at the Fort in Roxbury and the Elma Lewis Playhouse in the Park series in Franklin Park, or movies on the Neponset River, attract hundreds of people from all walks of life. What better way to bring Bostonians together and create real community? There’s so much more we can do. Bring food carts and concessions to the parks, especially those outside of downtown. Encourage outdoor visual art exhibits with installments that can withstand the elements. Make sure every neighborhood has a park or open space with yoga, youth sports, and children’s activities. Make parks the central gathering place for all ages.

Hand in hand with innovation is the need for equity across neighborhoods and funding for parks in the city budget. Mayor Menino and the Boston Parks Department carefully plan capital improvements in an attempt to make sure every neighborhood benefits. Yet some parks have much more than others. Wealthy, staffed friends groups advocate and raise funds for a few larger or downtown parks. Smaller volunteer friends groups hold an annual clean-up, and community gardeners manage maintenance along their sidewalks. Yet many parks have none of these financial or human resources, like the stunningly beautiful Horatio Harris Park in Roxbury, with its unappealing park furniture dating back at least 30 years.

Large institutions include nearby park and open space improvements and caretaking in their “community benefits.” They count in-kind open space donations towards their PILOT payments. But what happens to Almont Park in Mattapan, where there are no large nearby institutions? To fulfill the promise of a Boston for everyone, the new mayor must address this green gap.

Parks cannot continue to be relegated to bake sale status. The Trust for Public Land ranked Boston 28th among US cities in parks and recreation spending, at $115 per resident, compared to first-ranked Washington, DC, at $397 per capita and San Francisco and New York at $266. Just 0.7 percent of our tax money goes to park maintenance and programs. Raise this to 1 percent of the city budget and all of our parks will look a lot better. Our ball fields, courts, and playgrounds will get more maintenance instead of needing costly capital replacements. Park programming can expand across the city.

The wrangle over funding for the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway hinted at the costs of building and maintaining parkland, but did more to underscore the equity issue than assure that Boston would have a spectacular outdoor cultural venue over buried highway – an innovation of which the city and state should feel deservedly proud. Wonderful parkland has emerged from other Boston eyesores, including from several former garbage dumps: Pope John Paul II Park in Dorchester, Millennium Park in West Roxbury, Spectacle Island, and others. We’re moving in the right direction, but a real city and state commitment to parks and open space has been glaringly absent.

Where will the money come from? Some innovations could bring cost savings and direct revenues. Park concessions raise funds for big city parks all over the country. Boston could offer small business opportunities in parks and we’d have food carts, cross country ski and bike rentals, even tennis ball sales in parks. Facilities like the Franklin Park Golf Clubhouse could become a destination restaurant with minor building changes and good marketing, instead of the little known lunchtime grill it is today.

Currently, all park permits are awarded free of charge, even for adult leagues or large organized events that serve primarily out-of-Boston residents. Yet, most small and large municipalities charge $25 to submit a park permit application – a small fee that would reap at least $50,000 annually, more if a sliding scale were implemented for wealthier events and those causing greater damage to the parkland. Streamlining permitting, cutting bureaucracy, and supporting friends groups who bring funds for capital restoration and programs will save the city money and allow us to devote more available resources to actual park improvements.

Longer-term funding opportunities also exist. Passing the Community Preservation Act, a program from which other cities and towns in Massachusetts benefit, would generate significant money for Boston parks and historic renovations. Linkage funds from high-priced development and spreading community benefits from downtown institutions across the city could also support open space in all Boston neighborhoods.

Innovation might attract the attention of the new “1 in 3 Boston” generation of young adults, but it will also be a draw for Dorchester baseball coaches, Hyde Park artists, and families organizing a barbecue. Innovation and equity in our parks – taking risks and supporting green space outside of downtown – can help bring people from every neighborhood into their community park. The health of our city depends on it. We need the next mayor to fully commit.

Christine Poff is executive director of the Franklin Park Coalition and lead organizer of the citywide Boston Park Advocates network.