Photo Credit: Courtesy Of Daviess-Martin Joint County Parks & Recreation Department
As public land managers across the nation examine new ideas to solve growing budget problems, a variety of old schemes have been altered into new ones. Some work and some don't. This article describes our foray into what may be considered a new paradigm, as it involves crossing county borders to form a profitable partnership.
The Daviess-Martin Joint County Parks & Recreation Department is the only one of its kind in Indiana. As far as can be determined, it is the only joint county parks department in the U.S. Although there are various partnerships involving a county and a city or two cities, serving two county governments poses some interesting challenges. And one of the counties is heavily Republican and the other is heavily Democrat, so the politics of the mix becomes even more challenging. One county has a much larger overall tax base and budget than the other as well, so discussions about sharing costs is an easy way to start a fight.
A Hybrid Model
The current joint park department administration came on board in 1994, stepping into a long history of disagreement, fiscal inadequacies, and a decayed infrastructure that had not received any funding for capital expenditures in more than 15 years. So, in 1996 a new “hybrid” plan was developed, presented, and approved by both counties. At first, privatization was thought to be a way out of the budget feuds, but it didn’t take long to determine that if a private operator could step in and turn the fiscal bleeding into a profit, the dual-county agency should be able to as well. But this could not be accomplished within the “normal” mode of a county parks department. The plan was to be removed from the local tax rolls, accept zero funding from the counties, and restructure the operation into a business plan that depended on revenue earned from activities to fund operations and capital improvements. As intimidating as that may sound, the agency ended 1996 in the black for the first time in 17 years. In 1997, the agency ended the year with a 20-percent profit, which was used to fund the first capital budget in two decades. Each year profits were placed back into the facilities, focusing on areas that were generating revenue. Programs that were found to be revenue-negative were cancelled, while others, deemed revenue-positive, were added. Operating like a business proved that the agency could achieve the same success as a private operation—or even better—because it was still tax-exempt, so none of the profits left the operation.