Preventative Maintenance Is Essential!
Local parks are as diverse as the populations they serve, but most face similar challenges — limited funding, aging infrastructure, deferred maintenance, and limited capacity to carry out programs and services. Budget restraints and growing maintenance backlogs challenge providers’ ability to meet community demand. Meanwhile, resilient communities understand the importance of maintaining assets to help improve quality of life, enhance local economies, protect natural resources, and create great places to live, work, and play.
Our Purpose
Our Goal
The Maintenance Institute’s goal is to empower public land and recreation professionals to make the most impact for their communities, enhancing life-enriching services for all communities.
Our Vision
For those tasked with ensuring sustainable parks and public infrastructure, The Maintenance Institute saves you valuable time by creating, researching, and identifying THE best practices and education on grounds operations, land management and maintenance.
Establishment of The Maintenance Institute
In a year-long process, the Pennsylvania Recreation & Park Society worked in partnership with a team of parks, recreation and community planners, financial advisors, marketing professionals, and an Advisory Committee of practitioners from local, county, and state parks and recreation systems. They conducted extensive outreach and research to explore the feasibility of establishing a park maintenance institute and develop a plan of action to help our communities improve their capacity to maintain parks and recreation facilities.
Findings
1. Investment at Risk
Pennsylvania’s state level investment of over $500,000,000 over the past decade is, in many communities, at risk due to lack of maintenance. Local matching funds bring the total investment value to over $1,000,000,000.
2. Maintenance Information and Resources
Good information is available on park maintenance and best practices within municipalities as well as in related public, non-profit and commercial organizations. However, these organizations as well as elected officials making decisions about maintenance, rarely have the time and knowledge about where to access state-of-the art information on park maintenance and experts willing to share their knowledge and assistance.
3. No Organization in Place for Maintenance
There’s no one organization whose sole mission is park maintenance. While the Pennsylvania Recreation & Park Society and the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation & Natural Resources could take on the role of park maintenance expertise, these agencies cannot realistically add maintenance to already over-burdened agendas. To help local parks and recreation agencies across the US and beyond with the latest tools, techniques and strategies for efficient park maintenance, a dedicated organization focused on maintenance and operations is needed.
4. Positive Response to Concept of a Maintenance Institute
Parks and recreation practitioners, public works managers, elected and appointed officials, commercial vendors for parks and recreation equipment and materials, and related organizations express positive support for The Maintenance Institute. Common responses are that an organization dedicated to park maintenance should have been formed a long time ago, that vendors wanted to know how they could get involved; practitioners wanted to know how they could access it; and related organizations asked how they could support the effort.
