Thanks to funding from Metro’s Local Share grant program, people in an underserved area in northwest Tigard will soon have convenient access to nature. Metro Council has approved around $1.3 million in Local Share funds to partially fund a new park on Steve Street in the northwest section of the city.
The park will offer picnicking, a loop trail, community garden plots, and natural and traditional play areas. It’s expected to be open to the public by the end of 2025. The park is an example of how city and regional planning are crucial to making the most of taxpayer dollars. At the city level, it meets the goals of Tigard’s recently updated park plan, which largely focuses on ensuring that all neighborhoods have access to at least one park or natural area within walking distance.
“We wanted to ensure that we were delivering our park services equitably,” said City of Tigard project manager Carla Staedter. “So we did an analysis of the city’s existing parks and trail systems and where they were located, and then we did an analysis of which households could access those parks within a 10-minute walk.”
The city found a dozen “gap” areas that were not able to access a park or natural area within a 10-minute walk. The city noticed a trend in some of the neighborhoods, including the one this new park, temporarily called Steve Street Park, will serve. This area is more diverse, holds more multi-family homes, and has lower average incomes averages than Tigard residents as a whole. According to Staedter, this is why the Steve Street Park is being prioritized over other gap areas: “so that we can continue to balance the tables and provide equity.”
The project also fits well within the goals of the voter-approved 2019 Metro parks and nature bond, and specifically its Local Share program. This program allocates $92 million for greater Portland’s 27 park providers to protect and restore habitat and clean water and to build and care for parks and trails that connect people to nature close to home.
“When the Local Share funding showed up, it was clearly the perfect match for this project,” Staedter said.
Local share is one way the bond puts money into local communities so they can build projects that are important to them. At the same time, the bond criteria ensure that projects meet regional goals, including community engagement, racial equity, and climate resilience.
“The city is really being very responsive to our criteria, both the community engagement criteria and the criteria around centering historically marginalized communities,” said Metro Local Share program manager Antonia Machado.
The site is adjacent to a stream system that is a tributary to Ash Creek, one of two fish-bearing streams in the city; restoration work at the park will help keep the water cool and clean.
“It will also provide critical wildlife habitat within a highly urbanized neighborhood,” Machado said.
The city reached out to community members to determine what other features and activities will be available at the park. It also requested suggestions for new park names as part of that outreach, after hearing from neighbors that a new name was preferred.
The City of Tigard was awarded a total of $3.1 million in Local Share funding, about half of which is being used to build the new Steve Street park. The city plans to apply to use the rest of their funds to build a second park in another underserved area. This park is informally named Bagan Park. Ultimately the city hopes to have a dense park system that connects neighborhoods to each other and to nature.
Local Share funding has been supporting parks and nature projects since 1995. By allocating funds to park providers all over the Portland metro area, developing suburban areas can get access to nature.
“We in parks in nature know the myriad of benefits that come from having parks and open space,” Machado said. “A lot of those benefits, we know, are not equally distributed or haven't historically been equally distributed throughout our metro area.”
Now, careful planning and partnership between government agencies is working to change that.