Robert Carmona has an ambitious goal for Gilbert’s upcoming Parks and Recreation Master Plan.
“Our goal — I’ve been very open about it — is to have the most engagement a master plan has ever seen,” the town’s Parks and Recreation director said. “And the goal of that really is because the Gilbert community deserves it. They’re at a point where there’s a lot of development, a lot of opportunity, and we need to make sure we get it right and we get the community what they truly need.”
By the most engagement a master plan has ever seen, Carmona does not mean a Gilbert master plan. He means any community anywhere. The aim is to top the more than 30,000 engagements for Pflugerville, Texas, a suburb of Austin.
Gilbert is well on its way with an aggressive engagement campaign that will last through July 4. But cataloging all the responses and figuring out just how many people provided feedback will take time. Carmona said it may be September before they know a final number.
The parks master plan will guide the town’s planning for parks and trails expansion and refurbishment over the next decade or more, as well as the department’s programming for residents.
“The thing I’ll say is there’s a lot of needs in Gilbert over the next 10 years-plus,” Carmona said. “And hopefully the master plan will be able to help provide the data and the community feedback to help guide those decisions as we have to decide what comes online.”
Engagement campaign
Once upon a time, seeking engagement might have meant pushing out a survey and having a couple town hall-style meetings that few people if any attended. That is not this campaign.
The survey exists, being pushed hard by the town’s “digital government” team that runs the town’s messaging and social-media accounts.
But gone are the old-style community meetings, replaced by efforts to get out in the community, going to the various parks, but also to other places and events where they can reach people.
There, the parks team has an idea board where people can put up sticky notes with their ideas. They also have pictures of different concepts and amenities, which people can endorse by putting a sticker on it. Online, people can pin location-specific ideas to a map.
The department also has a traveling mural, which has pre-drawn illustrations representing Gilbert’s different parks and facilities. Residents then can come color in the existing illustrations or create their own drawing in the white space, representing what they would like to see.
“It’s been a kind of multifaceted approach where our goal is that everyone in Gilbert has a chance to interact with it and that we go out to them, not just find us,” Carmona said. “We have found that by going out to where people are, we definitely get a lot better engagement.”
An event at a Morrison Ranch neighborhood party drew a lot of interest with the new approach.
“That was the most engagement we had seen at an event,” Carmona said. They took a lot of time to fill out the idea list to put the stickers on the boards. We did a happy hour at O.H.S.O. where we went out to ‘The Park’ in O.H.S.O. and had fantastic engagement with the people there.”
Another idea drew big response: an ice cream social May 18 at a half-dozen Gilbert ice cream parlors where the town sponsored free treats for people who came out and gave their input.
Resident response
At Andy’s Frozen Custard south of the Heritage District, customers had little room to maneuver through the patio from the crush of people in attendance.
Ava Cormier, 8, completing second grade at American Leadership Academy, pinned the future water park at Gilbert Regional Park, where she also says she is a fan of the zipline.
Her family is a big user of the parks, including Cosmo Dog Park and Crossroads. Her dad even says he may grab the QR code there to the digital survey.
“I’d like to maybe do give a little more input, you know what I mean?” he said while waiting in the line for a treat. “As opposed to just a sticker dot. But it’s something. I mean, more parks is always great as opposed to the apartment complexes that I know everybody’s complaining about — and storage units and just everything else.”
Mike Alvarado is more into playground features as he has a 3-year-old daughter, Ariel. They often go to Freestone Park. He would like to see a shaded splash pad there.
“Splash pads — kids love ‘em,” he said. “And when it’s blistering heat, shaded would be a good thing.”
Shyla Collier’s interest lies more with programming for her seventh-grade son, Christian, though he likes the water park.
“I thought the STEM classes sounded very cool,” she said. “The youth camps are a need, too.”
Ideas rolling in
The engagement campaign still has time remaining, and the town hopes to see major trends by the end of summer and have the draft of the master plan for review by November, spokesperson Eva Kirschbaum said. The goal is to bring it to Gilbert Town Council in early 2024,
Nonetheless, the town is getting some sneak peeks on where residents stand as the ideas roll in.
People are highly interested in seeing Gilbert Regional Park and Desert Sky Park, the town’s two newest parks, be completed, Carmona said. Along with that, people in the southern part of the town would like a recreation center, like Freestone and McQueen recreation centers in north Gilbert.
“I think when we looked at the undeveloped properties, there’s potential opportunities there, whether it be Gilbert Regional or some of the other areas that the town owns property,” Carmona said.
The water park, Cactus Surf Park, also is popular. The park is slated to start construction later this year and open in 2025. But Carmona said aquatics in general and other water amenities also have drawn a lot of interest.
The town also will have focus groups to get feedback on more specific items, like adaptive recreation, senior programming, sports leagues and nonprofit partners.
It’s not just big developments the town is doing, either. The town just completed renovations on the tennis and basketball courts at Freestone, McQueen and Crossroads parks and put new sand on the volleyball courts.
“There’s been a lot of great ideas that come through,” Carmona said.” The Crossroads Dog Park is a great example of people wanted additional lights, and that’s something we heard.
And we were able to go put on another kind of pole, an LED pole, to light up an area that hadn’t been there before. So sometimes it’s also those things that are smaller, but when you actually hear from the community that’s utilizing it, we can make those changes.”
Tom Blodgett can be reached by email at tblodgett@iniusa.org or follow him @sp_blodgett on Twitter. We would like to invite our readers to submit their civil comments, pro or con, on this issue. Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org.
Tom Blodgett Senior News Editor | Gilbert @sp_blodgett
Meet Tom Tom Blodgett joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2022, when the company acquired Community Impact Newspaper's Phoenix-area properties. Raised in Arizona, he has spent more than 35 years in journalism in the state.
Community: He has served as an instructional professional in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 2005, and is editorial adviser to The State Press, the university's independent student media outlet. He also is director of operations for an 18U girls fastpitch softball team from Gilbert.
Education: Arizona State University with a BS in Journalism.
Random Fact: He lived in Belgium during his freshman year of high school.
Hobbies: Tweeting enthusiastically about ASU softball (season-ticket holder) and grumpily about other local sports (pessimistic fan).
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