City of Brookings
Parks, Recreation, and Open Space Master Plan
| Location: | Completed: | Project Type: | Partners: |
| Brookings, South Dakota | 2021 | City-Wide Parks and Recreation Master Plan | Confluence ETC Institute |
The City of Brookings Parks, Recreation & Forestry Department is committed to providing high quality parks and recreation facilities and recreation programs that serve the Brookings community. To build on this legacy, the City desired a Parks and Recreation Master Plan to establish a long-term plan focusing on sustainability and maximizing resources while providing an appropriate level and/or balance of facilities and amenities throughout the community. This Master Plan builds off of Brookings’ adopted 2010 Master Plan and created a new “road map” for the Parks, Recreation & Forestry Department to follow for their next ten years.
This Department builds and maintains the parks in the 697-acre Brookings Park system, while also cooperating closely with the Brookings School District in building and maintaining joint school and park facilities, in addition to other City of Brookings properties. The Department maintains a fully equipped maintenance fleet of vehicles, mowers, and specialty equipment. Full-time staff, assisted by seasonal employees, provides all maintenance and plays a significant role in developing and constructing new parks. Also, the Department provides many programming opportunities to the community that are held at the Department’s numerous special-use facilities, including an Ice Center, sports complexes and fields, a golf course, and parks.
This Master Plan establishes recommendations for Brookings to achieve the vision the community has for the park and recreation system as well as to achieve greater financial sustainability without sacrificing the value of the park assets and amenities or reducing the level of experiences and services available to users. As Brookings already oversees an impressive inventory of parkland, trails, and amenities with a dedicated workforce, the key recommendation of this plan was to ensure that there are properly maintained staffing levels for maintenance functions as it adds sustainability to the system and is important to bring all existing assets to their full lifecycle.
Our experience with PROS Consulting Inc. was everything we could have hoped for! The PROS team of professionals were a pleasure to work with during our Master Plan process and fully understood the unique challenges we face being a university town. By providing us clear direction, regular engagement and an easy-to-follow structure our project stayed on schedule. The final product we received is already being used to help Brookings make positive changes in our operations and planning for the future.