December 4, 2025 PC Parks Committee - Dec 04, 2025

meeting

Fairfax County Planning Commission 1h 56m 9 speakers 8 agenda items transcribed 7 days ago official recording ↗

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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

What agenda items are being opened at the start of the Parks Committee meeting?

Alis Wang 0:02

All right. Let's get started. So welcome to the Parks Committee meeting. Let's start with the minutes. We have to approve the minutes from November of last year. So do we have a motion?

Unknown 0:16

So moved.

Timothy J. Sargeant 0:17

Okay. Second.

Unknown 0:18

Second.

Mary D. Cortina 0:18

All

Alis Wang 0:19

right. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Abstentions? All right. That motion passes. The minutes are approved. So, yeah, so today we're going to hear from some folks on the needs assessment and parks and what progress has been made since we last met. I'm especially interested to hear about the urban parks framework and where we are with that. So should we start with introductions and then I'll let you all take it from here.

How does the new deputy director introduce himself and his background?

Jay Cole 0:51

Sure. I'll start off. Hi. I'm Jay Cole. I'm the executive director of the Park Authority. I'm going to take my time to introduce the new face sitting here that's about four days old here. And I'll let him introduce himself. Nigel's the new deputy director for planning and development. And so he is replacing Amy Vosper, who is retiring, and they have an overlap for about another month until she retires officially at the end of the month. So I'll let him, and then I'll turn it over to Kyle if he had anything to say.

Nigel Fields 1:21

Hey, good evening. Good evening, everyone. My name is Nigel Fields, as was said, and I'm delighted to be joining the Parks Authority. I'm just coming from the Environmental Protection Agency, where I ran the community development office there and revitalization. And before that, I was with the National Park Service for about 12 years. And I worked with a series of parks also in the headquarters office and the regional offices and done a range of things. And before that, I had spent most of my time in research and development within the environmental field. So it's fantastic to be able to join the group, and I'm learning an awful lot very quickly. And, yeah, glad to be here.

Jay Cole 2:00

We're going to – we're talking about the needs assessment today. And just so you know, during the planning commission when we're doing the CIP, which I may or may not have thought this was today until about three hours ago. And I was told that it's not. I like to own up to my own mistakes. But we're going to sort of, I'm going to try to put this into context for how we're going to use this also with the CIP. So we're going to sort of tie everything together, hopefully. Kyle, did you want to?

Kyle Stone 2:26

No, I'll just say hello. My name is Kyle Stone. I'm chair of the Park Authority. I'm happy to be here tonight looking forward to the conversation.

Dorsha Bhattacharya 2:35

Good evening, everyone. I'm Dorsha Bhattacharya.

What are the main findings of the five‑year needs assessment for Fairfax County parks?

Dorsha Bhattacharya 2:37

I'm the Division Director for Stewardship and Planning, and I've met almost all of you. Should we just head into the presentation right away? Awesome. So as about a year back, I had presented on the process strategy, how we are making prioritization decisions. It was part of our comprehensive plan part one update. And at that time, you all had asked about the urban parks framework and what we were doing with that. So we were waiting to complete our needs assessment that we are going to do every five years. The needs assessment basically asks the community, the residents of Fairfax County what they want, what their needs are, and if there are any barriers to accessing our facilities, and how we can better serve the population.

Dorsha Bhattacharya 3:29

So we have heard from them. We conducted online surveys. We did statistical surveys, also did extensive focus groups, and then we fed all of that data into the coming up with this recommendation. So today what I'm going to focus mostly on in this presentation is looking at a deeper dive into the demographic trends that we see across the county, what that means for the park authority and the county as a whole. I'm also going to touch a little bit on the peer comparisons that we did. So we did a little bit of a benchmarking study to let us know where we stand and how we are doing compared to our peers across the country. And then I'm going to end with some recommendations that the consultant team kind of

Dorsha Bhattacharya 4:24

put together for us to discuss and implement. And just to, as a sidebar, as we are putting the final touches to the needs assessment report, we are also starting up with our strategic planning effort.