Silverton City Council explores new way to fund parks, pool

Silverton residents pay for parks and the pool with a patchwork of fees and taxes that area voters may be asked to consider sewing up into a new parks and recreation district that would include out-of-town residents.

Whether the Silverton area should create a separate taxing district extending past the city limits to pay for parks and recreation is a question that urban and rural residents can begin answering later this year.  

If the City Council votes next month to go forward with a $25,000 feasibility study, members of the public can begin submitting formal comments as soon as this summer.

“This is a community decision, and we want as much participation as possible,” said Silverton City Manager Christy Wurster.

Researchers from Portland State University plan to create focus groups and an online survey to find out what Silverton-area residents do and don’t like about municipal parks, which services they use, and how they’d like them to grow.

“Right now, residents within the city proper are the ones paying for all these services – with the pool levy, park fee and general fund – and, to me, that’s patently unfair when it’s certainly not just the people who live in the city limits who use those facilities,” said Mayor Kyle Palmer.

State law allows communities to vote to form any of 28 different kinds of “special service districts” dedicated to taxing and funding targeted services such as fire, library, hospital, irrigation, air quality and other programs.

Special districts, cites and the county can only tax residents up to a combined total of $10-per-$1,000 of assessed property value.  When city leaders last discussed a parks and recreation district in 2014, Silverton residents were paying $9-per-$1,000, Wurster said.

Two decades ago, local voters denied a proposal to create a district with borders matching the Silver Falls School District, Palmer said. This time, all options on the table, even a district reaching just a mile or two out of town, he said.

Portland State’s researchers will explore small, medium and large district scenarios. Because city leaders in Mt. Angel and Scotts Mills aren’t joining the inquiry at this point, Wurster said, all three scenarios will likely be some combination of Silverton and its surrounding properties.

Examples of other districts can found throughout Oregon. 

Chehalem and North Clackamas districts in the Newberg/Dundee and Milwaukee/Happy Valley areas, respectively, are examples of districts that include good-sized cities. North County Parks and Recreation District in Nehalem, on the other hand, is mostly rural.

The Willamette Valley’s largest cities, Portland, Salem and Eugene, run their parks, pools and recreational programming with general funds, supplementing with bond and levy measures, although the greater Springfield area has one of the state’s oldest districts, Willamalane, formed in 1944.

In Silverton, Palmer said he’s curious whether a parks and recreation district could develop the sports fields conceptually planned for a piece of property above Pioneer Village along Ike Mooney Road or improve the 2.8-acre Pettit Property next to the Oregon Garden.

A baseball coach for 23 years, he said he envisions such a district providing support and structure for the area’s youth sports programs, which typically depend on the school district for playing space and volunteers for everything else. And Silverton Pool – dependent on successive tax levies to operate – might find permanent funding too, he said.

“We are not looking for something new to charge city residents for,” he said. “Rather, we are looking for an option that would possibly be better for them financially, or at least equal to where they’re at now.”

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