Why community recreation plans should include for profit actors: What do you do when important assets face dissolution?

The Seattle Times reports ("Roller skaters mourn potential loss of Federal Way rink, a haven for speedskaters and sociability") on the likelihood of a roller skating rink closing in Federal Way.  It's one of the only roller rinks in the area, and it is especially revered because of its wood floors.  From the article:

Pattison’s West fills a hole in the Puget Sound region’s inline skating community, which has suffered multiple losses of late. Nearby, Auburn Skate Connection closed during the pandemic, and Tiffany’s Skate Inn in Puyallup was destroyed in a fire last year. 

“If we close, that’s three major rinks in this area closing, which I feel kind of bad about,” Pattison said. 

... Cabinet makers, a sports bar and several churches have expressed interest in the place. It’s unlikely that a potential buyer would retain the skating rink, Pattison believes. The land’s appraised at about $1.5 million, according to the King County Department of Assessments.

... “The community really suffers when a roller rink leaves,” McMahon said. Rinks offer exercise and a safe alternative for young people, he said Roller hockey also will be affected by Pattison’s West’s closure, since players regularly practice there. “It brings tears to my eyes to think of that beautiful maple floor being torn out,” McMahon said.

In past blog entries about parks and recreation planning, I make the point that "master plans" need to be more expansive and include acknowledgement of and guidance for "parks" or "recreation" assets that are either controlled by other agencies (such as other city, county, special, state, or federal) or the private sector (fitness centers, hockey rinks, etc.) because circumstances may change and there should be guidance for it.

-- "How surveys based on gross data can be very misleading: DC and parks" (this piece discusses the issue in terms of a framework and is a response to how surveys using gross data over-rate the quality of DC's park assets)
-- "Federal shutdown as another example of why local jurisdictions should have more robust contingency and master planning processes"
-- "Parks issues"
-- "National Parks Week"
-- "Local parks planning, the USDA's National Arboretum, and the Friends of the National Arboretum"

For example, closure of state parks for budget reasons may lead to situations where city, county or other communities step in to run the park.  Localities may be especially motivated to do this if the park is a significant visitor attraction.

But doing this ad hoc, in a crisis, is a lot more difficult.  People are bad at making decisions even in the best of times.  And coming up with new monies in times of financial exigency is particularly difficult.  Therefore, mostly, ad hoc responses fail.

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For what it's worth, I make this argument--that "master plans" need to be more expansive and provide guidance for all the assets within the functional area of study, regardless of whether or not they are publicly owned, in particular by the agency doing the plan, with regard to three areas of planning in particular:

-- Parks and recreation (as mentioned above)

-- Cultural planning ("Community culture master plans should include an element on higher education institutions" and "Revisiting cultural plans having elements for retail")

-- Transportation ("The answer is: Create a single multi-state/regional multi-modal transit planning, management, and operations authority association," "Another example of the need to reconfigure transpo planning and operations at the metropolitan scale: Boston is seizing dockless bike share bikes, which compete with their dock-based system" and "City parking")

Besides the obvious example in DC of most of the parks being run by the National Park Service, with minimal attention to local needs, I became especially focused on it during the 2008 recession, when many state park agencies closed local parks, and then when I worked as a bicycle and pedestrian planner in Baltimore County, where there were conflicts between what we needed to do and gaps in state laws and practice.

I wanted to include recommendations on changes in state practice and my boss said "No, we don't have any authority over those agencies."  

I said, if gaps in planning policy and practice by state agencies create problems for local agencies, how are they supposed to know, if we don't tell them.  One was that the state should impose requirements on school systems to do transportation planning not just for buses, but for walking and biking, and another for the creation and updating of campus plans for state universities and colleges, that they should include biking and walking, not just cars and maybe transit, in the transportation planning requirements.

I included the recommendations, but they were excised in the review process, before the draft plan was posted publicly.