Blogs

Each election year, NPC hosts supervisorial candidate forums that focus specifically on park, recreation, and open space issues. Our goal is to give you the opportunity to learn more about each candidate's knowledge of and positions on these subjects. 

“Ensuring that there is a strong voice for parks and open space at City Hall is paramount to the success of our neighborhood parks,” Meredith Thomas, NPC Executive Director explains. “It is through the work of dedicated community volunteers that our parks flourish as an oasis to our daily lives, but it is with the support of their supervisors that our parks can continue to thrive.”

Join us at your district's forum!

The Community Opportunity Fund program (COF) of the 2008 Parks Bond is a $5 Million capital program that allows residents, neighborhood groups, and park advocates to initiate capital improvements in their parks by matching public funding with other private gifts and grants. The $3 Million in direct funding will be split into 3 rounds, with award budgets of $500K, $1.25 Million, and $1.25 Million. The deadline for the first round is September 24, 2010.

Click here to review the Community Opportunity Fund documents approved by the RPD Commission on June 17th. The final version of the COF application can be downloaded here.

COF Workshops

NPC partnered with RPD to hold informational workshops for the public. A representative for each application was required to attend a COF workshop. The workshops were held on 7/17, 7/21, 7/24, 7/28, 8/3.

Click here to see the meeting flyer.

Click here view the COF Workshop presentation.

How can we be certain this will benefit our parks and park users?

A proposed Charter Amendment (download here) would shift appointments to the Recreation and Park Commission from solely the Mayor to a split appointment process in which the Mayor would appoint 3 seats, the Board of Supervisors would appoint 3 seats and one seat would be a joint appointment between the Mayor and the President of the Board of Supervisors. The amendment would also allow for Commission decisions to be appealed to the Appeals Board. A public hearing on the amendment was held Friday, June 18th at 10am at City Hall. An agenda can be found here: http://www.sfbos.org/meeting.aspx?page=864.