SANGER – No matter how often they visit a local park or what sport they like to play — or not play — Sanger wants as many residents as possible to provide feedback on the city’s parks and recreation services.
This is because the city is currently at work updating its Parks and Recreation Master Plan, a document that guides the city’s investment in its park facilities and recreation programs. Now a few months into the process, Steve Duh, a principal with planning firm Conservation Technix, visited the Sanger City Council on Dec. 4 to share preliminary results of a community survey and talk about next steps.
“We’re at the front end of the project and wanted to use this as an opportunity to get your guidance about other things we should pay attention to as we move through this process,” Duh told the council. “Going forward beyond today, we’ll start to digest what we heard from the survey and the first open house and start to prepare what we call a needs assessment for the community.”
Sanger entered into a contract with Conservation Technix in April. Working alongside Visalia-based businesses Sierra Designs, Inc. and 4Creeks, Inc., Conservation Technix will spend the next 10 months or so engaging with the Sanger community, including residents, stakeholders, elected officials and city staff, to draft the master plan update.
Duh explained that the master plan is intended to be a guiding document for the future of the city’s park and recreation services. The last update to the master plan was adopted in 2007 and looked about 20 years into the future to 2025. This next update will also aim to lay out the next 20 years of city growth.
Starting in late August, Duh said the firm has already conducted one public open house to gather feedback and also put out a community survey that closed in October.
The city received what Duh called “solid results” from the survey; however, just 372 of the more than 26,500 residents living in Sanger responded to the survey, and council members said they hope to see more engagement.
“Great job on the survey, but … maybe we need to give community members more time to complete the survey,” Councilmember Dolores Melendez said. “I don’t know why the numbers are so low; that is a very low number for me. Maybe we can look into that. Other than that, I just want to continue to see how much participation our community wants to give — hopefully more.”
The survey was mailed to a random sample of residents and was also available for anyone to take online in English or Spanish. From the survey results, Duh said 96% of respondents felt that parks and recreation is essential or important to the quality of life in Sanger.
“That’s a great baseline, and it’s good to know where the community stands in terms of how they value parks and recreation offerings,” Duh said.
Further, about 64% of respondents said they visit a Sanger park at least monthly, Duh said. The most common use of parks was walking and running, followed by family-oriented activities like taking children to the playground, participating in family gatherings or using the park for relaxation.
Duh said some of the reasons survey respondents listed for why they may not use parks more often were that restrooms were not clean enough or there were not enough available, that park facilities were not as well maintained as people would like and that some people have a “limited sense of safety” in parks.
The survey also gathered perspectives on what residents would like to see more of in parks and if they would be supportive of an indoor recreation facility.
Mayor pro tem Daniel Martinez said he would like to see more specific feedback from the community. For example, with an indoor recreation facility, he wants to know what residents would want that to look like, whether it’s an ice hockey rink or indoor pickleball courts.
“You hear a lot about pickleball, … a lot of various communities are installing new courts, but is that something that Sanger wants?” Martinez said. “I think I would like to learn more via these surveys as far as specific activities.”
Martinez said that with a new 10-acre park the city recently had the chance to develop, community feedback led them to building a softball field, which gave youth a place to play that didn’t also double as a storm drain basin.
As the planning process continues, Duh said the city will organize a second open house in the spring, will hold small groups/focus groups with community members and will conduct interviews with stakeholders to continue to gather feedback.
Conservation Technix is also doing its own review of the city’s parks facilities and will use all of this to develop a community needs assessment, which identifies “what the community says it wants, what the city offers and, if there’s a mismatch, how that could be filled through future investments,” Duh said.
