Des Moines just approved an $8.4 million first phase for a $54 million park overhaul. The bid came in over estimate, and there's no maintenance plan in sight — meanwhile the city was cutting services 9% across the board just last year. Norm Van Eeden Petersman talks with parks consultant Jamie Sabbach, author of the new book The Bison Principle, and writer Michel Durand-Wood about what cities consistently leave out of these decisions. Construction is only about 20% of what a public asset costs over its lifetime, and most cities aren't planning for the rest. The conversation gets into maintenance backlogs, why capital and operating budgets are really the same money, and what a city would actually decide if the 50-year cost were part of the conversation from the start.
Hi there, and welcome to Up Zones, a Strong Towns podcast where we take an article from the news and talk about it from a Strong Towns perspective. I'm excited to share this article from Axios Des Moines about a park construction project that they are preparing for. Des Moines has approved an $8.4 million first phase construction contract for a long-planned $54.4 million overhaul of Birdland Park. They've proposed a multi-season skate ribbon and a bunch of other improvements along the way.
The bigger project is planned to stretch out over decades, and as is clear in the article, relies very heavily on external funding, with full completion probably taking at least 20 years, if not further. It is a major, long-awaited investment for Des Moines, but it is also one that is going to require a significant amount of public infrastructure and public contributions, which are coming from debt-based sources. This creates conditions in which these large-scale upgrades proposed for the community are going to need to be kept up and maintained in perpetuity.
With me today to talk about this is Jamie Sabbach of 110% Parks and Recreation consulting firm. Jamie's focus is especially on how to create high-capacity, high-functioning parks and recreation programming, and create the conditions in which communities can really lean into the strength that great parks and recreation services can bring about. Also with us is Michel Durand-Wood, the author of You'll Pay for This, a frequent Strong Towns contributor, the host of the Dear Winnipeg blog, and a participant in the group in Winnipeg that is seeking to cultivate a deeper sense of using resources well — within Elmwood, within the Chalmers neighbourhood, and all sorts of other things that Michel has been involved in. Welcome to both of you.
Thanks, Norm. Happy to be here.
Thanks, Norm.
Jamie, you were the one to share this article with us, and you have a lot of parks and recreation items on the back burner — projects that you're currently working on. I forgot to mention you've also just released a brand new book called The Bison Principle. Maybe start with that right off the top. Share a little bit about the book, and then also what put this article on your radar as something worth discussing today.
Sure. I appreciate the shout-out for the book. It was released just a week and a half ago, so I'm very excited about it. The subtitle speaks volumes: Clarity, Discipline and Courage in Local Government... Through the Lens of Parks and Recreation. It's really about being more thoughtful, more intentional, and more intelligent in our investment and spending choices as it relates to parks and recreation — but I would argue the same applies to local government more broadly.
There's a lot of expectation, a lot of demand, and finite resources. We've got systems that are struggling. Alternatively, some of those systems have frankly just overextended their resources and are having a very difficult time maintaining high levels of service. It's based on a philosophical underpinning, certainly, but there's narrative built around my 35 years in and around local government.
You've been in local government, and you've also advised local government and carved out a niche around the questions of how we ensure a financially sustainable base for our work. What stands out in the Axios article about the Des Moines project?
This story is new — hot off the press, they say. We pay attention to these kinds of stories. We look at news around systems that are building and growing and try to understand what their fiscal realities are and what the conditions of their community are. Des Moines is a microcosm of what's happening across the country. There's this pressure and expectation to build and grow, and at the same time, I think in some cases there's a dismissiveness around what we already have. We like the bright, shiny new. We gravitate towards the bells and whistles, and we sometimes dismiss and neglect what's already in place. I see this on a daily basis.
This is a recent story. I understand the draw to want to build for a community and take advantage of some previous plans that were put in place. I think the plan for this particular park was put in place in 2021. But as you dive into the article, there are questions around how it's going to be paid for. There's a focus on the construction and very little reference to how they're going to maintain this park — not only preventative maintenance, but the ongoing maintenance that will be required over the life of the asset, 20 or 30 years from now. It's one more story in this novel around how we have chosen to invest and spend taxpayer resources, and how we're prioritizing in our communities in the face of a lot of pressure.
I'm curious — would you endorse a strategy of multi-phased plans, if only because it means that whenever a ribbon cutting occurs, there's always a cleanup that occurs with it? If you slot in a ribbon cutting every year for yet another element of the project, maybe that's one of the ways in which you make sure that everything is in good condition. I'm a little bit facetious, but I feel like there is this question of how we make sure that we have routinely given attention to our spaces and allowed them to mature over time.
That's a great question, and there's a bit of a loaded quality to it. We know that we're rather deficient in spending time on how we're going to operate and maintain the assets we bring out — whether it's brick and mortar, whether it's a park space, a trail, whatever it might be. When we put that front and center and recognize that we've got to do the math around not only the groundbreaking and the ribbon cutting, but what this is going to cost us in year two, year five, year ten, and year twenty — that has to be front and center from the minute we start considering the investment.
We've talked about doing a better job in our profession of ribbon cutting for maintenance projects, so that we're celebrating the investment in taking care of what we have. There's a great story — actually a reference in the book. A dear colleague of mine teaches at Texas State University. They had sat through a program I'd facilitated, and they renovated a restroom on campus. They put a faux ribbon across the bathroom made of toilet paper, baked poop emoji cookies, and had pint glasses full of lemonade. They publicized the heck out of it — we're taking care of an asset that's in our system, as opposed to building something new, and we're very proud of that. There's a novelty around it, but the more we can celebrate roof replacements, HVAC replacements, and irrigation system replacements, the better off we're all going to be, rather than feeling like the only thing we can celebrate is a new asset.
That's a really good point. Rule of thumb in asset management is that 20 to 25% of the total cost of ownership of an asset is its initial construction cost. So even in a case like this $54 million project, even if they managed to get grants and get it all paid for, they're still on the hook for that 75 to 80% of the cost of ownership over the lifetime of it. That's the part we're not even thinking about, and much less celebrating. It is the major cost of owning and operating the asset — everything that comes after construction.
If we celebrated it more, or at least thought about it, it might be helpful. For Des Moines specifically — I don't want to pick on them, but I did a bit of research on this. Just last year, during their budget process, they were cutting 9% of their budget because they couldn't afford the money. Every single service was cut — whether it was parks, roads, or whatever, everything was cut 9%. Then the following year they come out with a massive project like this, saying now we're going to build this when they're clearly not maintaining what they have. That's problematic. Again, this isn't unique to Des Moines — it's North America-wide. But we need to celebrate those maintenance projects, because those are the things we forget about that are the biggest part of owning stuff as a city or a town.
Jamie, I'd be fascinated to hear, from your perspective, what are some of the layers that help as a starting point to analyze what they're doing? They're planning a skate ribbon like the one in Chicago's Maggie Daley Park, there's going to be a playground, a restroom, and a concessions building as part of phase one. Those are good things, and I look at it where they are doing their best. But even then, that first phase — the winning bid came in a million dollars over the city's estimate, which on an $8.4 million contract means they were off by a fair amount. How common is that? What are some of the ways in which we can alert ourselves when things are going to be more challenging than we expect? How would this become a really good project?
In my world, this is incredibly common — this is the standard. We want something new, so we have a master plan. Unfortunately, many master plans do not include the very thing that Michel just mentioned. We talk about construction costs in 2021 terms and forget to calculate a compounding figure of 3%, 4%, or 5% year over year. So even if the plan says it's going to cost $20 million, $50 million, or $100 million, we forget that by the time we break ground, it's no longer that figure. These master plans need to be better. We need to do a better job of planning.
We're enamored with the notion of master plans — it's a visioning document. We call them unicorns and rainbows in our little team. Aspirations are fine, but it's not enough. We have to address the gap between where we are today and the aspirations, and understand what that gap represents. If it's a $50 million project, what is it really going to be in 2025 if the estimate was made in 2021? What are the costs to operate and maintain it over its life cycle? Michel mentioned we're looking at 25% of the total cost to taxpayers being the initial construction cost over the life of the asset. We don't speak in those terms. We do a feasibility study and we talk about construction only.
One of the things that drives me crazy is the attitude that we'll just find the money. There's a reference to that in that article. I don't want to pick on Des Moines — it's a microcosm — but this is how we think, this is how we plan. We have to understand that where it's gotten us is not a good place. The gravy train ends, and it isn't going to get better if we don't think about the money on the front end before we say yes.
Especially when you think about opportunity cost. When we promise ourselves we'll find the money, where are we going to find it? What are we going to be sacrificing to make this happen? On the process side, we spend money, time, and human resources making these plans, moving them forward, doing a study, doing a design study, moving to the next phase. Every one of those phases costs money, and every one of those phases costs staff time, which also costs money. What could we be doing instead? Instead of spending $400,000 on a design study for a $54 million project — I'm just using numbers as an example — what could we have done with that $400,000 on the stuff we already own? What could we have improved?
There's always that opportunity cost discussion that we also don't seem to be having. We have all these discussions in silos, independent of each other, as though this project isn't also connected to everything else we do as a city. We have limited dollars. Everything we decide is also a decision to not do something else. That's part of the math that Jamie mentioned — we've just got to be better at calculating those costs and comparing them to what else we could be doing.
Michel, you wrote a book that addresses the fact that today's operating dollars are hampered by the commitments we make into the future — or helped by decisions made in the past to squirrel away money, or really hampered by decisions we make now that will spend future residents' money. Can you share more about the real challenge of committing future operating budgets to keep up what we commit to right now in the capital budget? It's one wallet covering these costs.
I think part of the problem is that 99.5% of North Americans are not accountants. When we get told things like "capital budget" and "operating budget," most of us don't know what that means. When we don't know what something is, we fill in the blanks. As a society, we've come to believe that capital dollars and operating dollars are two separate things. Operating dollars are something you have to find every year to pay your librarians and gardeners, but capital dollars is something where you find the money once and you're done. The idea is: we'll find the money, build it, and then we're done.
The reality is that capital dollars and operating dollars are the very same thing. They're just an accounting distinction that tells us when we're spending them. Capital dollars are essentially operating dollars that you are committing from another operating year — generally the future. Any time we build something, we are committing future dollars out of our operating budget to pay for it, whether we pay for it with debt or savings. Those are all operating dollars that we are promising to not spend on something else.
We kind of know this intuitively in our own personal lives. The example I like to use is: if you need new tires for your car, that would be a capital expense. If you want Taylor Swift concert tickets, that would be an operating expense. It doesn't matter if you put the tires on your credit card and spend your cash on the tickets, or the other way around. The result is the same. It's exactly the same thing in municipal finance. It doesn't matter whether you're borrowing for capital or operating — it doesn't change anything to the city's finances at the end of the day.
As soon as you've bought an elephant — or a car, or whatever it is — you have expenses that go with it from now on. There have been studies done on million-dollar home lotteries where something like 98% of winners have sold their home within a year, because a big house comes with big utility bills, big insurance, and big property taxes. Even if you get it for free up front, you can't afford to maintain it over time, so you have to get rid of it. It's the same thing in cities and towns. When we acquire massive infrastructure assets — whether gifted by developers or funded by federal and state grants — we have to look at the rest of the life of that asset and recognize that we are now responsible for feeding it. Elephants eat a lot of hay.
Part of the reason I wrote the book is that it's actually not that hard. There's not a lot you need to know to have a good sense of where we're headed as cities or towns. It takes very few skills to have that overview-level knowledge that allows you, as a co-owner of your city, to not be an absentee owner. It's a surprisingly small amount you need to understand.
I'd add that there's an unfortunate reality to all of this: the assumption that this only applies to community members. This applies equally to those who work in local government and don't understand some of the basics — and that is problematic. When you talk about capital and operating, I will face obstructionists within systems who insist they must be treated differently. They say, you've placed them in two different buckets, and that's just how our funding mechanisms and object codes are structured — this is the way we do business. Rather than considering: maybe we can think about this a little differently.
I've been using this phrase a lot — it's the lens through which we see things. Take these glasses off and put these on. A budget is how you've chosen to structure it. How you're deciding to invest and spend in operating the system versus the capital side is a systemic challenge, but you can potentially change that. We've got some community education and taxpayer education to do — certainly those residents are co-stewards and sometimes forget that — but we also have professionals managing these systems who don't understand what Michel just mentioned.
I completely agree. Even if only 0.5% of non-accountants can understand this, that's still 99% of the entire population. That includes not just citizens but public servants, council members, and local media reporters who are covering these things. It is absolutely critical that we reach that entire 99% so that we have better conversations — not just in the community, but around the council chamber, within the offices of administration, and also in what's being reported and what's being asked by our local media.
The media are doing the job of holding everybody to account, but they need to be asking the right questions. You can't ask the right questions if you don't know what you don't know. A lot of it is going to be just education — educating all the people in the room who touch these decisions, no matter how small or large.
It's about expectations management as well. Jamie, you're so good at saying there is a very clear distinction between what we need and what we wish for. I'm reminded of a fantastic article written a number of years ago by Grayson Johnson about buildings. The article is called "In Praise of Background Buildings," and she makes three points: first, we need buildings that are not trying to stand out in order to appreciate the ones that are; second, it's the occupants that make a building interesting — the form shapes the streetscape, but the interesting part is how buildings are lived in and around; and third, glamour tends to be fussy and expensive, and for the rest of us, humble, timeless, and familiar is a better direction.
That really stood out to me — Michel, you wrote about your community that there used to be scores of neighbourhood parks, and in old planning language they used the word "scores" with extra emphasis because there were so many they couldn't easily count them. Those are the background parks — spaces we fill not because they're fussy and expensive, but because they're present, available, malleable, and able to be shaped to our needs.
Jamie, can you share some of the challenge where simultaneously a system is closing centres and opening new ones at the same time — harming communities where a centre that was there for 70 years is the one that gets cut, while the brand new, glamorous thing gets built instead? Glamour is fussy and expensive. Shiny things have a luster for a while, and then you're moving on to the next thing. How do we get back to the habit of having background parks?
If I only knew, Norm. It's become an issue of organizational aesthetics, but there's a contradiction at the heart of it. We want our facilities on the front cover of Architectural Digest. We want awards in our lobbies. At the same time, if you dive deeper into the system, they can't take care of the ten neighbourhood centres they have, or maintain their trails, or maintain their parks. Irrigation systems are struggling. We're enamored with this organizational aesthetic around the brand new thing, but it's an incredible contradiction — because if you look under the covers, all this other stuff is falling apart.
We have strayed so far outside of our lane in public parks and recreation that I struggle to understand if we'll be able to recover before we actually combust. We have some systems in this country that have approached a billion dollars in maintenance backlog. The staff are stretched, and I made a comment in the book about this: doing more with less is not virtuous, it's exhaustion. That is not a good thing.
There's nowhere written anywhere that government should invest in pickleball courts for everybody, or build ice rinks in every community, or build 150,000 to 200,000 square-foot recreation centres when private and nonprofit organizations in our communities are already providing similar services. We've just run so far off the rails that it's hard to make sense of it. When we think about the contradiction of wanting all these new things but not being able to take care of what we have — to me, it's illogical, but we keep doing it. There's an exhaustion to thinking about it.
Other than continuing to help people understand the math and bend the ears of elected officials — and helping community members understand that these forums are not just for telling us what else you want, but rather for us telling you what we have and how we're struggling to pay for it — I don't know what the answer is. We make community engagement a classroom so people can understand these things. We don't want circumstances like we've seen in this country, where systems are closing and cities are filing bankruptcy. It is not looking favorable for some major municipalities in the United States in 2026 and 2027 who are on fiscal cliffs. There's a complexity to it.
Jamie, one of the things that stands out to me is there's no mention in the article of cost recovery or revenue creation. If you have an ice rink, you should probably charge people something so you can pay for the Zamboni driver. Looking at a project like this, there's no mention of small-scale commercial spaces or venues that can be booked — it's an afterthought. From a Strong Towns perspective, a good park radiates value in all of the adjacent private structures, buildings, and land. You do recoup some of that value through property taxes and sales taxes, but in projects like this, wouldn't one of the ways to make it more functional be to focus more on revenue creation or cost recovery?
Absolutely — 110% absolutely. We've got to think more about productivity. Strong Towns uses the phrase "community wealth," and we've used it for a long time. When people hear that, I think they don't take it with the intent that it's delivered. Community wealth is not about wealthy — it's about creating community wealth so that we can survive and thrive. We want physical wealth, mental wealth, all of that. We don't think about the productivity of our spaces.
For some reason — and I don't know when this happened, but I've been in and around this space for over three decades — it's as if the private sector is evil, rather than recognizing that we need to lift up the private sector because they pay taxes. We want them to thrive because they're helping support the entire ecosystem in our community. Why do we shy away from coffee shops in some of our park areas? Why do we shy away from vendor contracts and opportunities? There's always a skepticism and cynicism around these relationships, rather than recognizing that this is a really good thing for everybody.
Cost recovery has become a four-letter word in local government in the United States because we've simply misused it. We've treated it as cutting services and raising fees, rather than understanding how much stuff costs us and making an intelligent decision about what we need to recover to keep our system fiscally well. Ice rinks and outdoor pools are the two most expensive assets provided in parks and recreation — I would argue in government as a whole — and they're in high demand in a lot of communities, because people simply don't understand. What we ask in a survey is, 'Would you like this? Would you support it?' But what we don't say is, 'Would you support an outdoor pool if it costs you $108 a year in taxpayer money and required a membership or admission fees to operate and maintain it?' We forget that extra part of the question. I'd be curious about Michel's perspective on this.
I think it really comes back to this idea that we don't plan for the future. We're not doing a business plan on any of these projects. We're not looking at what it's going to cost us in the future, but we're also not looking at what the possible revenue sources could be. Cost recovery can also mean tax support — we don't necessarily need to have it all be user fees. There can be a different proportion: some portion of user fees and some portion of tax-based support. That can vary based on the project and the town's priorities.
We already have a general sense of that. A water utility is almost always exclusively user-fee cost recovery, because we're trying to manage a scarce resource and discourage overuse. For things with a clear public benefit, you can justify funding some of it with general taxes. You often see this with public transit, where fare box recovery is only a portion of the revenue and the rest is supported by property taxes. One interesting thing about transit in our city is that they call the tax-supported portion the "transit subsidy" — but that's the only service they call that for. They don't talk about the library subsidy or the police subsidy. Those are just services.
The cost recovery portion can be user fees, taxes, or a mix of both, and the exact proportion will depend from place to place. What is missing is that this discussion isn't happening when these projects are being planned. When we say we're going to build a water park or whatever it is, in the same sense that we're not checking the life cycle costs, we're also not looking at how this is going to impact our operating budget or what revenues we're going to need to pay for those costs. It's part of that initial analysis — not necessarily a formal business plan, but that initial discussion of: can we afford this, what does the money flow look like over the next 50 or 75 years, and what are the impacts on everything else we could be doing instead? The missing piece is not just the expense side, but also the revenue side.
In the article, it talks about another park in their system — another feature park, Grace Lake Park. What prompted the revenue question for me was the fact that in 1993 there was a Holiday Inn on the waterfront. There was this interloper, this commercial space — this problematic eyesore, supposedly. Mercifully, a flood took care of it, and then they basically had to find a way to get rid of that encumbrance so the place could be purely natural and purely for the community. But I'm sure there was some stored value there.
We're going to move into our Down Zone segment, partly because — as you can hear in the background — my puppy wants attention. I'll start, and then pass it over to you both.
For me, I want to highlight the website fieldofschemes.com. Partly, I want to correct myself — it's a fantastic website about the racket around pro sports teams and the efforts to force arenas on people and extract as much subsidy as possible. It is stunning. I'm somewhat saddened because right now I really want the provincial government in British Columbia to step in and save the Vancouver Whitecaps. I don't care what they're going to spend on the stadium — I just want them to give them the money so my team stays. Then I go and read a website like that and think, maybe I need to be careful. Neil deMause has been writing fantastic stuff on that site for probably a decade and a half, and it's definitely worth checking out, somewhat related to the theme as well. Michel, over to you.
I don't know if this is a trend anywhere, or if it's just my own kids, but my kids are 15, 12, and 9. As a parent, they get to an age where they start listening to their own kind of music. In my household, their own kind of music is what I was listening to in high school — the oldies, quote-unquote. My son was listening to something and I said, where did you learn about Billy Talent? He's like, what do you mean, how do you know about Billy Talent? Anyway, it's gotten me diving back into my old collection. Recently I've been listening to a lot of The Refreshments, specifically their first album, Fizzy Fuzzy Big and Buzzy. It's really brought me back — it's a solid album I can listen to over and over again. That's what's going on in my house.
My son — I introduced him to Avril Lavigne's "Sk8er Boi," which is very parks-and-rec cultured. He was like, this is fantastic, it's so good. She's a Canadian icon. What about you, Jamie, in the Down Zone?
I am boring compared to you two — boring with a capital B. I am rereading two doorstops. I am rereading Team of Rivals about Abraham Lincoln's presidency and his life. I'm an Illinois kid. I grew up in Chicago, so Lincoln has been a staple in my life from day one, and I'm enamored with his story. I think I'm on the fourth read of that. Then on a second read of The Power Broker, which is shocking and visceral in a lot of ways, given what we do — the corruption laced throughout that entire story I find fascinating and incredibly disheartening and tragic at the same time. I am toggling between those two, and now I've realized I need to get out more and listen to some good music.
That'll help! Those are two fantastic options. If anyone's interested, 99% Invisible did a great podcast read-through of The Power Broker with great guests and excellent supplementary material — worth checking out if your elbow is about to give way from holding the book.
As we close, thank you both. Michel, thanks so much for joining us on Up Zones.
Happy to be here.
Jamie, it's so good to have you here. We're really glad you could do it.
Appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Definitely go and pick up a copy of Michel's book, You'll Pay for This, and Jamie's book, The Bison Principle. I'm in such esteemed company — this is fantastic.
Three other people who are also part of this esteemed company are our Founding Circle members of Strong Towns. I want to recognize Andrew Price, who has written some fantastic articles on the Strong Towns website over the years — my favourite is his article on places and non-places, which has a lot of relevance for this conversation. Pierce and Becky Fry are also two members of the Founding Circle who were there from the beginning, helping to support what Strong Towns is doing.
As we continue to take stock of the realities that face our communities: our resources are limited, our time is precious, and we need to be careful about the commitments we make for the future while also safeguarding a strong, productive pattern of development. When we do that, good things follow. We get to enjoy strong places. Thanks, folks, for listening to Up Zones. Take care, and take care of your places.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.