August 2020 - Parks & Recreation - 51

Eugene; many go running in Alton Baker park on Pre's Trail. The
trail is named after Steve Prefontaine, an iconic University of Oregon runner.
The University of Oregon also
has longtime links to Nike, as the
company's cofounder, Phil Knight,
is a graduate and major benefactor.
The Oregon-based multinational
sporting goods and apparel corporation actually began in Eugene.
Matt Sayre, managing director
of Onward Eugene, an economic development organization that
recruits new tech and life science
companies to the region, offers
some guidance. " Livability and outdoor amenities are some of the key
draws to Eugene, " he states. " Right
now, one of the unexpected benefits
of our abundance of open spaces that have complemented social
distancing measures appears to be
fewer cases of COVID-19 relative
to more compact urban metros like
Seattle and San Francisco. " Sayre
himself is an avid runner and uses
Pre's Trail at least twice a week.
The origin of Pre's Trail can be
traced back to several P3s. Community organizations, including
the Oregon Track Club, the Steve
Prefontaine Foundation and private
donations from Bill Bowerman, cofounder of Nike, all played a role. In
more recent years, financial support
has come from Jim Jaqua, who also
has ties to Nike's origin.

Lessons from Stormwater
Partnerships
Craig Holland, senior director of
urban water for the Global Cities
program of The Nature Conservancy (TNC), contends there are
some lessons that can be transferred from other domains into the
world of parks-focused P3s. The P3
projects he has worked on have not

been aimed at public parks. Rather,
they've been focused on creating
natural stormwater management
practices on private property that
yield a public benefit. Sometimes,
those projects have public accessibility or visibility where they create
an aesthetic benefit for a community. These are not parks, per se - at
least not in the traditional sense.
Holland offers some advice to
peers looking for specific ways
they can overcome the main impediments preventing successful
park partnerships of this kind. The
first is to " engage early and often
with your public-sector partners.
Bring them into your process for
structuring deals, managing risk,
hiring qualified contractors, and
highlight both the successes and
failures. It's important when creating a new partnership or market
that is managed by government to
help them understand the business
model of the market participants.
This will make policy and programmatic changes more responsive to the needs of the market
participants. "
Ensuring the success of a partnership depends on a few key elements, according to Holland. His
TNC team does an after-action
debrief for all projects that they
undertake to document what did
and did not go well. " Based on
that analysis, we try to expand relationships with contractors that we
work well with and provide feedback to those that didn't work out, "
he explains. Since Holland and his
colleagues are acting as project developers, not engineers or general
contractors, one of his primary
goals for market participation " is
to build up the local expertise for
successful project analysis and delivery, " he says. " To the degree we
can, we try to create long-standing

partnerships with firms that share
our values and desire to expand
market uptake. This ensures those
firms will continue to invest in the
human and project resources necessary to scale up their businesses
to match the city and our ambition,
which are aligned. "

The cities are getting better at
" marrying the myriad beneﬁts
of building more natural
stormwater infrastructure across
city agencies and priorities, "
including water quality,
urban heat island mitigation,
ﬂood mitigation, increased
green space and workforce
development.
Looking down the road, Holland
is mindful of one key fact: during
the more than 10 years he's been
doing this work, he has " seen cities become increasingly more sophisticated in how they engage the
private and NGO sectors, structure
and manage their programs, and
create incentives that drive market activity. " The cities are getting
better at " marrying the myriad
benefits of building more natural
stormwater infrastructure across
city agencies and priorities, " including water quality, urban heat
island mitigation, flood mitigation,
increased green space and workforce development. Perhaps that is
the silver lining for parks and recreation, especially during these uncertain and challenging times.
Gordon Feller is Founder of Meeting of the Minds and serves
on the Boards of multiple nonproﬁts and for-proﬁts,
advocating for partnerships as an executive advisor to both
corporations and governments. (gordon@gordonfeller.com,
@GordonFeller).

PA R K S A N D R E C R E AT I O N .O R G | AU G U S T 2 02 0 |

Parks & Recreation

49
August 2020 - Parks & Recreation

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of August 2020 - Parks & Recreation
