Travis County Commssioners Court
July 22, 2003
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Item 33
Now since we're on parks, let's go to the park fees item. That is number 33, discuss proposed fy '04 park fee yes , sir and take appropriate action. Joe? Thank you very much. We appreciate it.
>> thank y'all. Not everybody at once.
>> good morning, my name is cynthia mcdonald's donald. I'm the financial manufacturing for transportation and national resources. And we're here before the court today to recommend various park fee vess. And our recommendations are a result of the decline in our cost recovery rate for the park system. Over the past five years we've declined from 50% recovery to about 33% recovery across all parks. Some of the reasons that contribute to the decline in the cost recovery rate are the fees have remained constant for the past 10 years. We've not changed any of our fees since 1993. In addition to that, we've added two metropolitan parks and also the timber creek floodplain buyouts, we've done the maintenance for that. And also the general increase due to inflation over the past 10 years has been roughly 19% compounded. What i'd like you to do is go over the various recommendations. We have permit fee changes for our existing parks. We'd like to also initiate the boat trailer parking fee. We have some recommendations regarding our athletic fields and some additional services fees, the concession and shelters. Under the permit revenue changes, we are looking at the day use permit, which is currently five dollars per vehicle. We're asking the court to approve eight dollars per vehicle. And these would be at the lake parks. Monday through Thursday would be still the five-dollar rate, but on the weekend, Friday through Sunday and holidays would be the higher rate. The change would actually bring you about 2 survey thousand dollars -- $278,000. Under recommendation b, we have the pedestrian -- bicyclist permit. It's currently two dollars. And we would like to go up to three dollars. And again, those would be at the lake parks. That revenue from this increase would only be about $1,200. On the primitive camping, the day-night combo permit, we currently charge $10 per vehicle, which is inclusive of the five dollars a day use and the five dollars for the camping portion. We're asking the court to go to $15, which would include the eight-dollar increase for entrance -- general use, and seven dollars for the camping portion. The increase in revenue, that would be about $82,000. Improved camping, we're asking to go from 15 to $20 per vehicle and to ultimately initiate a 10-dollar nonrefundable reservation fee. The annual day use permit, we're asking for -- we actually have two recommendations on the annual. The first recommendation e is asking to go from a $50 per vehicle to 75 on the annual pass, which would net about $51,000 in revenue. Recommendation f is a second alternative to that. It would remain at $50 per vehicle, but we would institute blackout dates. These would be weekend and holidays between memorial day and labor day, roughly may through September, our busiest times. And that would bring in another $16,000. The duplicate annual pirments, what we're asking the court to do is do away with the duplicate permit. It's low volume. We think it would be much better managed if we just require people to buy additional annual passes. And we're not asking for any changes to the pedestrian or bicycle annual permits, which is currently $25. We are asking to eliminate the $15 per vehicle for the night dive permit. We've basically rolled that into the camping. Recommendation of the lone star pass and senior citizen exemption, we're asking the court to continue to waive day use fees at all lcra and Travis County parks to senior citizens 62 of age and over.
>> do we have any special provision for Travis County retirees? A couple of folks that apparently fish quite a bit, for them to access one of these parks say to fish right now, what's the charge? Assuming they come through --
>> five dollars.
>> for a retiree over 62, they would get this exemption and it would be free? Retire e. Clear clear. Ble ].
>> or they can come in early. A lot of the fishermen actually come in early morning before the booths even open.
>> what time is that?
>> well, generally they open around seven or eight in the summertime. And a lot of fishermen come in around 4:00 or 5:00 o'clock in the morning.
>> recommendation k, the overnight camping permit for lone star or annual permit holders, would increase from five to seven dollars, netting you another two thousand dollars in revenue.
>> do we need to keep going through the listing. Maybe we ought to find out if there are any issues or problems or questions from the court on any of these? How's that?
>> okay. I did look through them and they seemed reasonable to me. I defer to y'all's judgment. I have two or three questions. The first one is is there a legal requirement that these be posted or advertised before we take action? None that you are aware of or the answer is no?
>> no, judge. [ laughter ]
>> haven't we always, though, advertised these, had like a short public hearing to invite input? And when would we want these to become effective? So we have time to do that?
>> understand that your preliminary budget zooms these few changes have -- assumes these few changes have taken place.
>> I'm also assuming that the preliminary budget is preliminary. [ laughter ] I understand. I think christian is paying attention. But I guess my recommendation would be that at least we would advertise these, at some point have a short public hearing just to invite input. It could be that persons coming in and give points of view that we didn't think of or awch -- often we thought of, but we didn't think it was important. Typically we don't get much input, but every now and then from a category of users we get different input. And I forgot my third question. On those two, in my view it would be a good thing for us to tentatively for us to approve these, advertise them, have a hopefully brief public hearing and invite input from impacted residents and at least get their input on it. I would think that would be good government process.
>> judge, based on been there, done that related to park fee discussions before, if there is a choice to be made, I would advocate for recommendation f related to the annual day use permit as opposed to increasing it from $50 to 75. That's a big chunk of change. We've got a lot of foangz that get the annual permit. And I would we would be flooded primarily with wind surfers saying that's pretty stiff in one jump. But you can get there related to more income, not as much, but you get there if you keep it at 50 bucks and have the blackout periods and then somebody would be paying to use the blackout periods to be able to go out to the lake, the permit wouldn't work that day, that would not impact the wind surfing community because they do not go on the lake on the holidays because that is when there is no room and they stay away. So in terms of keeping a satisfied a very large group of folks who would see 75 as being pretty steep, we also have very long-standing adopt-a-park relationships with the wind surfing community that they do a lot of good things on behalf of Travis County, and that's also something that in terms of wanting to keep that fee down primarily for those folks because they do good things to earn their keep, so to speak. So if I had to choose between e and f of which one to go forward with, i'd go f, using blackout period, which is very standard related to airline tickets, popular movies. It's the idea that the most used time that permit would not work.
>> under recommendation f you're -- if you're assessing if you adopted the recommendation as well, the protected revenue would be about 570,000.
>> how much?
>> 570,000. That would be with recommendation f.
>> okay.
>> so are we asked to choose between e and f?
>> yes, e would be going from 50 to 75, which would be about 475,000. It's a difference of about 34,000.
>> so how did we arrive at $75?
>> that was based on the parks staff recommendation.
>> how did we arrive at $75?
>> I'm with Travis County parks. The $75 was based on other organizations, other parks, both national and state parks, what they're offering as an annual type pass. Ours is somewhat different than others, but it's similar in nature, and that's comparable to the other fees.
>> to me that was just a big jump. It may be where you want to get to, but the concept of blackout fees appeals to me greatly, and it seems it was more an appropriate strategy. You do blackout fees because those are the blackout periods because that's something people are used to in terms of heavy times when there's huge use out there. And then if you're going raise the annual permit fee, that's something that's phased in over a number of years because it just seems big to go from 50 to 75. And if we want to pack this room, that's the guaranteed way to do it.
>> I move that we adopt the recommendations here and that we especially invite comments from residents on whether e is better or f. If I'm using one of these, whether I would rather pay, what, 75 with no blackout or $50 with blackout. I assume that if it's six of one and half dozen of the other for us, it wouldn't matter a whole lot; however, we'll defer. And if we say written comments are preferred, is that fine?
>> or e-mail.
>> written is something that we can document and the staff can write down the tally.
>> the use that's preferred.
>> judge, are you saying it's preliminary?
>> yes, ma'am.
>> proposed. If you say preliminary, then I think I can go with that.
>> I said preliminary, the motion.
>> because I feel more comfortable running these changes by the users first. And then asking for comment from the citizens. Very preliminary.
>> I agree. And if we have -- if you are affected by e and f or e or f, then you will do which is better, which should the court do. And that may help us.
>> and I'm hooking at opqr. I really want to get some feedback.
>> okay.
>> are we going to make a special effort to contact our known user communities that are out there, the baseball communities, soccer communities, the wind surfing community, the diving community, fill in the blank community, to make sure everybody knows?
>> just a question of Commissioner Gomez. Do you have any question regarding the background for any of those fees? Issues I just want to run it by them so they can look at them and be aware before I say that I already voted for something.
>> if we have -- if the public hearing and we plan to take action about a month from now or by mid August, I think we'll be in good shape. If we publicize it two or three weeks for comments, give us an opportunity, post this about a month from now, take action.
>> anything more than 10 days is great.
>> Commissioner Daugherty?
>> I was just saying i'll double-check with the auditor's office on when the next revenue -- [inaudible - no mic].
>> we may want to put some kind of notice or advertising, make sure we get it out to the lake papers that we've got, the special communities related to our lake parking.
>> Commissioner Daugherty?
>> well, I look forward to -- I look forward to having the people come down and speak to this, but I can tell you that from a philosophical standpoint, this is what I expect tnr to tell us. Yale are the experts, you know what your cost is. This is the perfect way to keep taxes -- this is a user fee. Now, unless I'm not believing you, then we ought to sit up here and take the heat when somebody says, do you know what, this is what it costs us to run this service. It costs us a lot more than this. We're trying to recp recapture. I know when you put 100 people in the room everybody starts feeling a little differently sometimes, but hopefully we'll hear from these folks. But I do think from the standpoint of how this ought to be dealt with, this is the perfect way. This is a user fee, and we have a cost to do these things and we can either pay for it this way or we pay for it with the ad valorem taxes. And we all know how everybody feels about that.
>> the only thing that I kind of feel funny about this is that we ask people to approve these in bond elections. And yeah, everybody's told that your taxes are going to go up for this, but do we tell them that user fees are going to go up as well? And so perhaps we need to consider the costs before we put these items on the bond election, especially when the economy is down and families who don't have the resources that all families or the average family in Travis County has, we're going to continue adding more fees to their -- just because they want to use a park. So I think there's some truth in taxation that probably needs to occur.
>> I think the only difference is that we're talking about operations. And operations is very different and you do know or you do realize that people when they vote for bonds, they don't really consider the operations. That is incumbent on us as the government to say, but how do we operate them? So I at least feel like I have a stance to stand up for somebody. Thank you very much.
>> and the only other perspective that you did not lay out is we have not increased park fees since 1993, and a lot has changed since 1993, including two major bond issues. We didn't used to have the kind of facilities that we have now that are tournament quality and have amenities that you could only dream of in terms of large metropolitan parks. And in terms of related to the affordability issue, I'm very cognizant of that and we are still not going to be charging the youth, nonprofit youth leagues. It is only for the ad-on kind of amenities, like to have lights or to have the super duper concession stands. Those things are appropriate. But for the basic use of the field, that is not going to change related to use. That will make it important that we didn't have parks like this in 1993 related to southeast and northeast and soon to be east. We should be proud of that.
>> I think that we need to use the time to explain the issues to families so that they'll understand why the fee increase.
>> you bet you.
>> all in favor of the motion? That passes by unanimous vote.
Last Modified: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 1:52 PM