Residents in San Bruno want spruced-up parks 

That includes playgrounds, play equipment, athletics facilities like tennis, basketball and baseball courts, as well as improving ADA accessibility on existing features. 

In addition, residents — a great majority of who visit the parks more than once a week, Ivey-Thomas said — are interested in a greater variety of amenities like challenge elements, dog parks, bike racks, pet waste stations and artwork. Enhancing trails and natural elements was another top priority. 

Only 52% of respondents had children in the household, Ivey-Thomas said, emphasizing the importance of nature and parks access to the community as a whole. 

“Parks are not just relevant to those who have children and families,” she said. “Parks are relevant as a whole to your San Bruno community.” 

The consulting firm also surveyed the functionality of the 19 existing parks within San Bruno city limits, excluding the Crestmoor Canyon Open Space because it doesn’t provide active recreation activities. 

There’s one community park, dubbed City Park, that spans 28.9 acres. Thirteen parks within the city are designed as neighborhood parks, and five are pocket parts, used mostly by adjacent neighborhoods. 

According to the study, a majority of parks assets — including outdoor recreation, trails and sports fields — fall into the “good,” “fair” and “poor” categories, meaning they are either working well with some deficiencies, functional but leaning toward failing or essentially unusable. 

“To compare to other communities in the Bay Area, this is a massive portion of your assets that are in a fair to poor condition, and if this isn’t addressed sooner, this is going to extend to deferred maintenance,” Ivey-Thomas said. 

Ivey-Thomas said parks rated the highest in the city include Earl-Glenview Park, Florida Avenue Park and Grundy Park, while the worst-rated includes Fleetwood Park and Seventh Avenue Park.  

A socioeconomic analysis of the city found that the east side of the city suffers from the greatest need, including high numbers of pollution, the least health conditions and the greatest health insecurity. The good news, however, is that city staff are working diligently to maintain parks in that area, Ivey-Thomas said. 

“The parks are functioning as well as they can on the east side, and if anything we saw parks on the west side were in need of improvement,” she said. 

Though the parks system in the city requires continuing improvement, Mayor Rico Medina emphasized that the city has offered increasing recreation services throughout the years. 

“As far as offering those opportunities and rentals, when you look from a historical perspective, we have evolved,” he said.