Portland Parks and Recreation (Parks) manages a nationally honored system that includes 11,415 park acres, 271 buildings and the City’s urban forest. A key objective for Parks and for the City is to maintain and protect this diverse portfolio of assets. Parks – funded by General Fund revenue – must strive to make the best use of its limited maintenance dollars. Given the variety of daily maintenance needs across the Parks system, our audit objective was to determine if Parks has a structure in place to evaluate whether its maintenance goals and objectives are efficiently and effectively met.
Experts on parks maintenance describe such efforts as being the least understood functions of local government. The public views the upkeep of parks as relatively simple and straightforward, but in fact, parks are complicated to maintain. Within the field of parks maintenance, there are a number of general approaches to evaluating maintenance services. For example, we analyzed whether Parks had incorporated evaluation approaches similar to the following five:
Compare maintenance efforts to defined maintenance expectations
Design and construct parks for reduced maintenance costs
Manage information to systematically analyze maintenance services
Determine the optimal and cost-effective mix of maintenance activities
Use performance measures to assess maintenance productivity and quality
We found that Parks does not have an adequate understanding of whether its maintenance practices are efficient and effective. Although Parks has the tools and software to track maintenance along these five approaches, it lacks a formal structure to determine whether maintenance efforts are meeting objectives. Specifically, we found:
Clear maintenance expectations are needed to evaluate against maintenance efforts
More emphasis is needed on maintenance during planning, design and construction decisions
Maintenance data should be better managed and used in decisions
Preparation is needed to transition from reactive to more preventive maintenance
More robust performance measurement is needed to evaluate maintenance
Parks is beginning to address some of the five approaches, and needs more focus on the others if it intends to systematically evaluate its maintenance activities. We make recommendations to help Parks focus on feedback mechanisms that can ensure it achieves its intend- ed results, and continuously improves maintenance across the parks system.