Erie City Council is now putting a 20-year plan for the city’s parks into action, unanimously voting to approve the resolution.
The “Erie Outside: The City of Erie’s Comprehensive Recreation, Parks, and Open Space Plan” lays out goals for maintaining, improving and investing in the city’s 52 parks and open spaces.
“Now that we have the full adoption of the plan, we’re gonna be full steam ahead with working internally, working on recommendations that have come out of the plan,” said Jackie Spry, the bureau chief of planning and zoning for the City of Erie.
The plan focuses on park maintenance, accessibility, amenities and creating more vibrant places for people to gather.
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City leaders said each part of the plan was shaped by input from over a thousand community members through surveys, workshops and other outreach.
“We did so much public involvement in every single step, and it really shows because the product that we now have, the plan, has so much community input. It really lets our neighbors tell us what they want to see, what they don’t like, what they wish they had, and that’s really so important,” said Daria Devlin, mayor of the City of Erie.
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“Those are the things that we’re going to be taking into account, making sure that what we’ve heard throughout this engagement process through the community input that we’ve received, which is a pretty robust engagement process, is that we will be focusing on those things first,” said Spry.
Now that the plan has been approved, city leaders are working towards finding additional funding for the projects and improvements it recommends.
“We really want to get to work, we have some parks money that has been put aside, this was ARP money that was dedicated years ago, and so now we want to move to implementation,” said Mayor Devlin.
Project leaders said the goal is to make sure Erie’s parks continue serving residents while preparing them for future needs.
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