September 2020 - Parks & Recreation - 25

Recreation and Park Association, we continue to prioritize ensuring all people have access to the benefits
of local parks and recreation. We want to help communities fill the parks gaps in their neighborhoods
and to provide them with wonderful, beautiful and
highly functioning parks and natural areas.
Our public policy and advocacy team is purposeful in advancing the opportunities to enhance the resources available for our members. Most recently, we
achieved a great victory with the passage and signing
of the Great American Outdoors Act. This new law
will provide historic levels of funding and unprecedented impact. Not only did this legislation have
overwhelming support among those of us who are
committed to the outdoors, conservation and recreation, but also it was an incredible win for the outdoors. What's more, it represents another example
of how policies related to the outdoors bring Republicans and Democrats together.
However, the law's biggest and most important
win may be the pathway to equity that it creates.
This new law will provide $9.5 billion to reduce the
maintenance backlog on federal public lands and
$900 million annually for the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), effectively ending the long
and unfair tradition of diverting billions of dollars
in funds needed for LWCF to other unrelated programs. LWCF has made significant impacts in helping to build local parks over the years, but as funds
were diverted to unrelated programs, communities
were shortchanged and access to recreation became
unbalanced. The Great American Outdoors Act can
finally fix this problem.
While the unprecedented commitment to robust
funding has taken center stage in this debate, we cannot ignore the unprecedented access to quality outdoor recreation this law will provide for everyone.
The full and permanent LWCF funding will help
ensure outdoor recreation can reach all communities
and is available to everyone through the stateside assistance grants, which help create quality local parks
and access to outdoor recreation in local communities. These funds will eliminate the traditional barriers
that restrict many people from accessing quality outdoor experiences, including cost and transportation.
The Great American Outdoors Act does many things,
but the equity it will help create for all communities is,
without question, its greatest impact.

Our goal is to help increase the
positive impact on our communities by advancing an accessible, inclusive, welcoming and
memorable parks experience for
everyone.
As we look forward to the legislative challenges
that lay ahead, we will continue to focus our actions
through an equity lens to ensure that inclusiveness is
at the center of our policy activities. Our goal is to
help increase the positive impact on our communities by advancing an accessible, inclusive, welcoming
and memorable parks experience for everyone - an
experience that allows people to connect with nature
and with one another.
Elvis Cordova is Vice President of Public Policy
and Advocacy at NRPA (ecordova@nrpa.org).

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September 2020 - Parks & Recreation

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