This year, we worked in every corner of the city to expand recreational opportunities, restore our urban forest, build and design new parks, renovate play areas, and engage with community.
As Seattle’s population grows, and livability, affordability, and transportation issues continue to become more challenging, Seattle Parks and Recreation (SPR) is working hard to provide affordable, accessible programming that helps maintain the livability of our city, and to provide indoor and outdoor spaces for community to gather, be active, and connect with each other and the natural environment.
Read on to see how SPR helped support a Healthy Environment in 2019, and click the links to see how we supported Healthy People and Strong Communities!
Healthy Environment:
- Acquired new park land: SPR acquired 8 parcels of property, totaling 7.8 acres of new public park lands. These acquisitions, consisting of 6 acres of new greenspace properties and 1.8 acres of active park land, meet a range of public open space and recreation needs. Scheduled to close in late December 2019 is an addition to Terry Pettus Park, which will effectively double the access to Lake Union for the Eastlake community.
- Restored our urban forest: This year, through the Green Seattle Partnership, volunteers donated more than 62,000 hours of time to remove invasive plants from more than 105 acres of parkland and helped us install more than 72,000 plants.
- Supported pesticide reduction efforts: SPR coordinated efforts to propose and implement a Mayor’s Executive Order restricting the use of the pesticide Glyphosate by the City.
- Managed irrigation and reduced water use through computer-assisted monitoring and timely irrigation head repair across 350 irrigated sites.
- Maintained parks citywide: SPR provided 320,719 labor hours to maintain parks citywide.
- Supported the completion of the Master Plan Update for Kubota Garden: Working with the Kubota Garden Foundation, we jointly supported the completion of the Master Plan Update for Kubota Garden to build a roadmap for the planning, development and refinement of Kubota Garden over the next 25 years.