Parks Are Infrastructure: Why Rural Communities Need to Bring Parks and Recreation into their Community Plans

The case for treating recreation as essential — not optional

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The fairgrounds. A trail with exercise stations. A school field open to the public on weekends. In rural communities, these are not extras — they are essential infrastructure. These spaces support physical activity, host community events, and strengthen the social fabric that holds towns together.

We are in the midst of a generational change in interest in parks and recreation, not just as an optional quality of life “want-to” but as a public health “must-have”.

Yet park systems in small and mid-sized communities rarely receive the same analytical attention as roads, utilities, or schools. Funding cycles are irregular, parks master plans sit unimplemented for decades, and the case for investment is often made in terms of amenity rather than necessity. This week’s post makes the opposite argument: parks and recreational infrastructure are as foundational to community health and resilience as any other public system — and they deserve to be planned, funded, and managed accordingly.

Today we’re going to referring to a couple projects I’ve worked on with Marvin Planning Consultants (MPC). Hall County and Grand Island, Nebraska, for example, incorporated parks as ‘a building block of the quality of life in a community,’ into their comprehensive plans. In the City Burwell, Nebraska, plan (and other local plans), we note that parks serve serve both city residents and the wider county. We’ll also highlight plans recently adopted by Thayer and Jefferson counties, down along the Kansas state line, which don’t have their own parks, but everybody in the county has access to parks and natural areas close to home.

Parks as Part of the Community, Not Something Apart

The most common mistake in park planning is staying inside the Parks Plan silo. Parks and recreation are core infrastructure of any community, large or small. Land use, transportation, water (and sewer), education, all rely on parks and recreation. Parks and rec isolated from the community are just window dressing.

We can’t treat parks and rec as isolated amenities: a playground here, a ball field there, a picnic shelter at the edge of town. When parks are only mapped as “amenities,” they’re easy to cut when budgets get tight. Traditional site-by-site logic produces fragmented outcomes. A new playground in one neighborhood does nothing for residents two miles away without safe walking or cycling routes to reach it. A renovated sports complex is underutilized if it cannot be accessed by transit or on foot.

On the other hand, parks and recreation are increasingly becoming regional amenities. Families out in the country have always brought their kids into the town swimming pool. Today, those same families may be driving their kids cross country for competitive softball leagues or to play in the big soccer tournament, while the city families drive their RV out to the County park for a staycation. We are all connected, town and country.

Effective park planning requires a network perspective. This means understanding how facilities connect to each other and to the neighborhoods they serve — and identifying the gaps in that network before deciding where to invest. A trail that links a school, a park, and a commercial district does more work than three unconnected facilities of equivalent quality. In rural contexts especially, where distances are greater and populations are spread out, connectivity is not a luxury refinement; it is the precondition for use.

In Nebraska, Hall County’s plan maps a web of off‑street and on‑street trails with named segments and future links, treating trails as a county‑wide circulation system. Burwell’s plan, in contrast, reads like a town at the start of this process: residents are asking for paved multi‑use trails, and one of the top action items is to connect City Park to public schools.

Network thinking also changes how planners assess equity. The standard level-of-service metric — measuring park acreage per 1,000 residents — tells us almost nothing about who can actually access that acreage. A community may have ample park space on paper while entire neighborhoods remain effectively unserved due to physical barriers, distance, or lack of safe routes. Mapping access catchments (the actual areas within walkable or bikeable distance of a park) reveals a more honest picture of who the system serves and who it does not.

The Multiplier Function of Shared Space

Parks serve functions that go well beyond organized recreation. A well-designed park is also a stormwater management system, an urban heat island buffer, a mental health resource, and a venue for civic life. County fairgrounds host agricultural shows, emergency staging operations, vaccination drives, and community markets. School fields, opened to the public after hours, double the effective recreational footprint of a system without adding a single facility. These multiplicative functions are rarely captured in conventional cost-benefit analyses — which is one reason parks tend to fare poorly in capital budget competitions.

Planners and administrators who wish to make a stronger case for park investment should document these co-benefits systematically. This means working across departments: coordinating with public health on physical activity and mental wellbeing data, with public works on green infrastructure performance, with emergency management on event-hosting capacity. A park that reduces downstream flooding, improves air quality, and reduces per-capita health costs is not a discretionary amenity — it is a performing asset.

Our local comprehensive plans already hint at this multiplier role. In Jefferson County, Nebraska, the fairgrounds double as a racetrack and 4‑H hub; Thayer County’s fairgrounds layer a county fair, a dirt‑oval speedway, and an activity center on one site; Burwell’s Frontier Fairgrounds combine a nationally known rodeo arena with fair facilities, backed by CDBG tourism investment. None of these are ‘just’ parks—they’re multi‑purpose civic campuses.

Planning Incrementally, Funding Strategically

Most rural and small-town governments cannot afford a comprehensive park build-out in a single capital cycle. Nor should they try. Incremental planning — identifying the highest-impact improvements and sequencing them over five to ten years — produces better outcomes than deferred master plans that never survive a budget cycle intact.

Incrementalism works when it is strategic. This means beginning with a baseline assessment: inventorying existing facilities, mapping access catchments, surveying resident priorities, and identifying the critical network gaps. From this baseline, a prioritized project list can be developed — not organized by political convenience, but by impact per dollar and by the degree to which each project enables future investments. A trailhead parking area, for instance, may be low-cost but unlock a five-mile trail corridor that would otherwise see no use.

Funding strategy is equally important. The majority of rural park systems rely almost entirely on general fund allocations — the most competitive and least predictable source available. Diversifying the funding base is essential. Dedicated revenue mechanisms (special assessment districts, park levies, development impact fees) provide predictability. Grant programs from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the Community Development Block Grant program, and USDA’s Community Facilities initiative offer substantial capital at modest local match requirements. Partnerships with land trusts, foundations, and health systems — which have a direct financial interest in preventive infrastructure — are increasingly viable.

Many rural communities have a narrow capacity to build their own parks and recreation facilities, so the plan functions more as an orchestration of everyone working in the area. Yet we all know everything is related and the more specific we get the more likely we are to get things done. In Burwell, for example, the comprehensive plan goes beyond wish lists: it assigns each parks action (from a city‑wide master plan to new mini‑parks and trail segments) a lead entity, potential funding sources, and a timeframe. That’s what incremental, strategic planning looks like.

What “Improvement” Actually Means

Not all park improvements require new construction. In many communities, the highest-return investments are operational and programmatic: extending hours, adding lighting, running structured programming in underused spaces, and improving maintenance consistency. Research consistently shows that perceived safety — closely tied to maintenance quality and active use — is a stronger determinant of park utilization than the presence of new facilities. A well-lit, well-maintained trail used by dozens of people daily does more public health work than an elaborate facility that sees use only on weekends.

This has implications for how communities allocate their limited park budgets. Capital investment is visible and politically legible; maintenance and operations are not. Yet the long-run return on maintenance investment is substantial — not only in extended facility lifespans, but in the visitor rates and health outcomes that justify continued political support. Planners who wish to sustain park investment over time must make the case for operational funding with the same rigor they bring to capital projects.

If you flip to the Parks chapter of many rural comp plans, the most actionable language isn’t about fancy new facilities at all. It’s about ‘incremental improvements’ to existing parks, adding ADA‑accessible equipment, or maintaining aging pools. Splashpads are popular, but so are developmentally appropriate places for children to play. Those lines may be less glamorous than a new complex, but they’re where most of the real return on investment actually sits.

Looking Ahead

The communities that have made the most durable investments in recreational infrastructure share a common approach: they treat parks not as a budget line but as a system — one that requires ongoing stewardship, strategic planning, and cross-sectoral coordination. They have institutionalized the work, building the administrative capacity to pursue grants, manage partnerships, and adapt plans as conditions change.

In Jefferson County, for example, residents are split on whether there are adequate recreation options for adults and seniors; in Burwell, town hall participants are already asking for multi‑use trails and neighborhood parks. The demand is not the problem. What we need is follow‑through and prioritization.

For communities earlier in this process, the starting point is not necessarily a master plan or a capital budget. It is a clear-eyed assessment of what already exists, who can reach it, and what the single next step would be to improve that picture. The fairgrounds, the trail, the school field — these are the assets already in hand. The question is how to connect them, improve them, and ensure they continue to serve everyone in the community for the decades ahead.

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Sources: West Virginia University / CDC Prevention Research Center (Morgantown trail studies, 2001–2015); Rails to Trails Conservancy; Roanoke County Parks, Recreation and Tourism; California Department of Food and Agriculture Fairs & Expositions Branch (2021–2023).

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Sources: West Virginia University / CDC Prevention Research Center (Morgantown trail studies, 2001–2015); Rails to Trails Conservancy; Roanoke County Parks, Recreation and Tourism; California Department of Food and Agriculture Fairs & Expositions Branch (2021–2023).