Council tells parks consultant: plan for what Cortez can keep up
Every member who spoke at Tuesday's listening session came back to the same two words — sustainable and deferred. The parks master plan runs to July 2027, with a survey and community meetings in January.
Asked what a successful parks and recreation master plan would look like in ten years, every member of Cortez City Council who spoke gave a version of the same answer on Tuesday evening: something the city can still afford to maintain.
The hour-long work session before the council’s regular meeting was given over to a listening session run by Hadley Peterson, the Kimley-Horn project manager leading the city’s parks and recreation master plan. The plan is the process the city has said will settle the long-term future of the outdoor pool, whose closure it reversed last week.
“We already have a lot of deferred maintenance on things now,” one councilmember said. “So if you’re going to put new things on the list, are we going to be able to manage those for the next 10 years?” Another said the plan should establish who the parks actually serve — how many users come from inside the city limits and how many from outside — because that bears on how projects get funded.
Several members returned to the risk of a plan nobody uses. “I think a lot of times cities put a lot of resources into making a plan and then it can sit on a shelf,” one said. “So I want this plan to be really realistic and usable.”
One member summed up his own test as three questions: what the city has, what it needs and what it wants. On the last, he drew a line. “We don’t want another park of grandeur with ferris wheels and things like that, because we can’t support it 10 years from now.” He returned to it at the end of the session, recalling a vision for a park on South Park that he called wonderful but not realistic.
Asked for the single biggest challenge facing Cortez over the next decade, the first answer was immediate: money, and sustainable financing. Members named the community itself as the matching opportunity, and one added the town’s retro feel and its heritage.
Who gets asked, and when
More than one councilmember pushed on how the city reaches people. If sessions are held in the middle of the day, one said, working parents cannot come and retired residents can, “and we’re going to get a very different opinion.” Another said she was trying to think of ways to include people with limited time, since the residents who use parks most are often the least able to attend a meeting.
A member who works in public health described parks as third spaces — places people meet outside home and work — and said losing them damages a community’s sense of belonging. Another, who grew up in Cortez, said the parks are where she found her outlets and “things to kind of keep you out of trouble.” A third said the first thing visitors remark on is how many parks the town has, and that it is a reason people move here.
One member asked how Cortez compares with other towns, saying he believed the city has bragging rights and wanted that written down. Peterson said that comparison is part of the plan and that the consultants are choosing the peer communities now.
Where the plan is
Assistant Parks and Recreation Director Jennifer Bandi, who is managing the project for the city, said the plan launched in September with a virtual meeting and that Kimley-Horn is in Cortez this week to start in person, taking an inventory of every parks and recreation asset and walking the facilities. This week also brings focus groups with the parks, recreation and forestry advisory board, the golf advisory committee and community sports groups.
The engagement runs in four phases, which the packet names as listen and learn, prioritize and test, shape the path forward, and summarize and close the loop. The next substantial round comes in January 2027, with a community meeting, pop-up events, more focus groups, a statistically valid survey and an interactive map. Initial findings on how residents use the parks, and on the department’s strengths, barriers and priorities, are due by the end of February 2027.
Peterson said the engagement team includes a Montezuma County resident doing on-the-ground outreach and a Front Range nonprofit that specializes in reaching people other methods miss.
The agenda packet says the master plan process “runs 9 months total, beginning in October 2026 and concluding in July 2027.” Peterson told council at the meeting that it would run about eight months. The written figure is the one the city has published.
The work session also carried interviews for two board seats, which council filled later the same evening. The city’s public budget forum, where the pool is expected to come up again, is at City Hall on Wednesday from 6 to 7 p.m. The work session is posted in full on the city’s council meetings channel, and the work session packet carries the questions put to council.