Carroll County wants residents' ideas for next parks plan at upcoming sessions in Eldersburg, Hampstead

The Carroll County Department of Recreation and Parks will hold two public listening sessions over the next two weeks, asking residents what they want from the county's parks, trails and open space over the next five years.

The sessions feed the county's 2027 Land Preservation, Park and Recreation Plan, a document Maryland requires every county to update every five years. It sets Carroll's priorities for building parks, running recreation programs and buying open space, and it steers spending in the Community Investment Program, the county's six-year capital budget. The plan is also what keeps Carroll eligible for Program Open Space, the state fund the county calls its main source of money for park construction.

In March, the department put out an online needs-assessment survey for the update. For the last plan, it ran two in-person sessions in September 2021, at Freedom Park in Sykesville and Leister Park in Hampstead, alongside a virtual option, and a survey that drew more than 1,100 responses.

The plan now in effect was adopted in 2022, and its findings are where this round starts.

Residents asked for trails above everything else. Every survey the county reviewed ranked trails, paved and unpaved, as the amenity people most want, ahead of restrooms, natural areas and athletic fields.

Carroll is not short on land. The plan counted about 8,070 acres of publicly accessible recreation land, though that figure takes in school grounds and town parks; county-run parks account for about 4,800 acres. More than 99% of residents live within five miles of park or recreation land.

Where the county came up short was courts. Measured against national standards for a park system serving a population its size, Carroll lagged on basketball and tennis courts, and the plan projected baseball diamonds would fall behind by 2030. School courts, it said, close the tennis gap.

Most of the money went to upkeep. Of the six-year parks capital budget covering fiscal 2022 through 2027, about $5 million, or 43%, was set to go toward repairing and replacing aging park infrastructure, with $1.9 million reserved for buying land.

The county is not starting from scratch. Its 2022 plan counted nine sites across Carroll — some county-owned, some belonging to towns — where amenities could be added, in the plan's words, "once sufficient development funding becomes available."

They include Bollinger Park and an expansion of Memorial Park in Taneytown, the Quaker Hill site in Union Bridge, the Boxwood Drive ballfields, Crowltowne open space, Westminster's former Wakefield Valley golf course, 145 undeveloped acres north of Taneytown that the plan calls Northwest Area Regional Park, and later phases at Krimgold and Leister parks.

Krimgold and Leister show what that wait looks like. Both were started to absorb growth from the late 1990s and 2000s, the plan said, and neither was finished. Their development was curtailed by past diversions and delays of Program Open Space money, the same state fund the county calls its primary source for park construction.

Two other properties the plan designated for park development do not appear on that list: the 100-acre former Harrison Leishear property on Ridge Road in Mount Airy and a 7-acre former wastewater lagoon site in New Windsor.

For buying land rather than building on it, the plan set aside $1,934,000 over six years and named one top priority: an inactive rail corridor north of Taneytown, about six miles long and roughly 49 acres of railroad right-of-way, which the county wanted to turn into a hiker-biker trail crossing the Mason-Dixon Line toward Littlestown, Pennsylvania. Carroll had pursued the corridor for nearly 20 years and had been rebuffed by the railroad before, the plan said, and was then negotiating with the owner, Genesee & Wyoming, to acquire use of the line through railbanking.

Neither the county's announcement of the listening sessions nor its parks-plan webpage, which still presents the 2022 plan as current, says where that stands today.

Two longer-term pressures run underneath all of it.

One is age. Citing state projections, the plan said Carroll's population 60 and older would grow by more than 11,000 by 2030 and reach 32% of residents, up from 25% in 2020, while the school-age population flattened out. That points toward trails and facilities built for every age, the plan said, and it expected any drop in youth field use to be offset by demand from adult programs and passive recreation.

The other is staffing. The department ran the county's park system with 26 full-time employees, plus part-time and seasonal workers and program instructors — far smaller than its counterparts in neighboring counties, the plan said, and leaning hard on volunteers to make up the difference. Volunteers filled about 8,800 roles a year, down from 12,601 in 2012, a slide the plan listed among its major challenges.

Residents can attend either session or reach the Department of Recreation and Parks at 410-386-2103 or [email protected]. The 2022 plan is posted on the county's website.

Anyone who needs an accommodation to take part should contact the county Department of Citizen Services at 410-386-3600, 1-888-302-8978 or MD Relay 7-1-1, or email [email protected], no later than 72 hours before the session.

Photo: from 2022 Carroll County Preservation, Park and Recreation Plans (LPPRP)