Publications

Summer 2003 Newsletter

Glendale Unified & City Partner To Revitalize Neighborhoods With Joint-Use Parks & Schools

Like much of Southern California, Glendale is trying to build infrastructure to serve a growing population but has very little land for new civic buildings. Joint-use facilities, particularly schools, offer Glendale's administrators an opportunity to maximize the space that is available for development. NSBN is pleased to reprent this interview with James Brown, Superintendent of the Glendale Unified School District, James Starbird, City Manager of Glendale, and Nello Iacono, Director of Parks, Recreation, and Community Services for the city of Glendale in which they discuss the city's efforts to design and build joint-use facitilies.

What is Glendale's need for school facilities? How many schools do you have to build and/or modernize in the coming years?

Brown: The Glendale Unified School District serves approximately 30,000 students and operates 31 school sites, 9 of which are on multi-track, year-round schedules. Our existing facilities were not built to accomodate our present student population. If we are to have a chance at minimizing the overcrowding at these locations, we will have to build at least two additional high schools and three more elementary schools. And that is in addition to the serious issues we have to addresses regarding modernization.

You say you need two more high schools and three more elementary schools. How do you find land in a dense urban area like Glendale? Give us some sense of the challenge.

Brown: The School District has not generally been very successful at finding land for new schools. Because of that we have worked closely with the City to determine some alternative sites that might become available in the near future. They have been helpful but not much has happened.
The cost of reclaiming land for school use is extremely high. Plus there is so little flexibility in the law about using alternative sites for schools. There are a number of regulations on classroom size, building construction and codes. And regardless of our relationship with the City those still limit our ability to construct facilities. Add to that the site acquisition and eminent domain procedures necessary to build the kind of large-scale facilities necessary to handle the forecasted growth, and we simply do not have the resources available.

Jim Starbird, you must sense the pressure on the school district as well as on your own facilities needs as part of a growing metropolis. How do you interface on this facilities issue with the school district, and plan your own parks, libraries and recreational projects in concert with their needs for land, space and facilities? Are you in competition or is there a way to collaborate?

Starbird: As a City we are probably both collaborating and competing with the School District.

We have one of the densest urban cores in California. And we are faced with very large, dense neighborhoods that lack the park and outdoor facilities we believe are necessary to create and maintain viable and vibrant neighborhoods.

But, we've recognized that one of the greatest opportunities we have to cure that problem is to partner with the school district and create recreational and community facilities on school sites. Regardless of the district's facility shortage, the sites that the District does operate are well integrated into Glendale's neighborhoods. That placement affords us some opportunities for expansion, redesign or even joint-use of existing playground facilities and community centers as a mechanism to increase open space and have a greater presence in the neighborhood.

Schools tend to be open only 1/3 of the day, yet you have this great demand for open space both before school and after school. How do you overcome the barriers that do not enable the facility to be open longer and make it possible to jointly manage and operate these facilities for the benefit of these neighborhoods? What rules have changed? What conditions have changed so you can do this?

Nello Iacono: Because of the growing demand for open space it's become clear that partnerships between schools and cities are at a premium. Because of that we are seeing an attempt from all parties involved to look at these schoolyards and ask, 'Why aren't they open after three or four o'clock in the afternoon?' 'Why can't we open them on the weekends?' 'And why aren't these facilities available to the community?'

Additionally, this isn't merely about schoolyards, it's about adjoining properties that can be acquired and utilized for parks after school and on weekends, yet made available to the school during the day for its activity needs. Each of these partnerships is really a win-win situation.

How have you dealt with the maintenance, operation and funding issues? Are there joint powers authorities that operate and maintain these collaborative operations?

Brown: We haven't tried to create a joint powers authority to do this. We've merely created a management group to oversee a series of separate operational agreements which basically formalize which functions and responsibilities each party is required to oversee and how the funding will flow. It doesn't involve a major change of governance. We have worked through existing government authorities. In this case, creating a mechanism that links already existing departments and oversight seems to make more sense than trying to create a new joint powers authority.

Starbird: The Edison Pacific Project really represents a model for dealing with issues collaboratively. That project was the impetus for a Master Agreement between the city and the school district designed both specifically for the Edison Pacific project as well for possible future joint-use projects.

That agreement is rather interesting from a modeling perspective because we first worked on a core agreement of basic values and principles. We just signed that preamble and from here forward, each new project or facility becomes an addendum to that master agreement.

However, while this agreement can be used as a model in a variety of municipalities, a necessary prerequisite to its effective implementation is the attitudinal shift of our school districts and our cities. That attitudinal shift cannot just happen among administrators, it must happen at the Board and City Council levels in order for the staff to step out of traditional roles and begin to look at accomplishing these efforts based on community benefit rather than on their particular constituency's desires. We need to look at the City's constituents and the School District's constituents as a single constituency with an around-the-clock need that neither one of us can fulfill alone. Until a city gets that attitudinal shift, it will be impossible to really affect this kind of change.

That sentiment makes eminent common sense, but the reality, many assert, has never been that the rules, regulations and funding mechanisms encourage the accomplishment of that common agenda. What gets in the way? What do we need to change in order to realize that objective?

Brown: We've had to work through building code issues, state versus local public works requirements, fire safety issues on construction modernization, etc. all because the law currently creates separate requirements for different funding sources.

That's why we are hopeful that the next bond will provide a clear incentive for parties to begin to engage in conversations about projects and maybe create a simple, clear system for distributing funds.

Legislators should make an effort to create a funding stream specifically devoted to joint-use. If we can't overhaul the whole system, we must create another mechanism to get funds to joint-use projects so that agencies that are already working together can continue to do so.

Starbird: We are always seeing inconsistency in state policy-it's no wonder we have the patchwork quilt approach that we have regarding these issues. For example, local school districts are significantly impacted by housing development. Yet despite that we still see a significant number of bills-particularly in this last legislative session-providing fewer incentives and establishing a number of penalties on communities for not jumping at the chance to support their "fair share" of housing development. There has been no thought about how that policy impacts city facilities or school facilities. That is the kind of dysfunction that we are dealing with.

If we hope to realize an agenda which encourages joint-use, the Legislature must realize that there is a connection among these issues. Unless and until those connections are made, I see very little hope for any kind of connection in funding sources, state policies or programs that are able to complement what we are doing at the local level.

You've completed a couple years worth of collaborative planning on schools, cities and parks and now we hear that because of the budget deficit your funding stream may be in jeopardy. How is capital or land use planning possible when the funding mechanisms are so uncertain?

Nelle: It is clearly a problem. With regard to parks and recreation we have Prop. 12 funding that's out there right now and we've got Prop. 40 sitting on the March Ballot. But if we have continued problems with the economy, are those funds going to be jeopardized? Relying merely on bond funding-particularly when the planning process is a long-term endeavor-makes it very difficult for us to develop enough parks and recreational opportunities for a city.

Are the problems of urban school district modernization and construction common throughout California or is this just a Southern California phenomenon? What are the rules and regulations? Do they favor urban school districts or are they counter-intuitive to urban school districts' agendas?

Brown: The majority of school facilities planning in the state of California has been in response to growth in suburban areas like Sacramento, the Central Valley and even Santa Clarita. People move to those areas and create a demand for new schools.

What they don't realize is that while facilities planning in the suburbs is focused on dealing with growth, urban districts already have unhoused students. And because the money is flowing to the suburban schools, urban districts like San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Glendale and San Diego must handle enrollment the only way they can-multi-track, year-round schools, class size reduction and putting bungalows on already impacted sites. That's what happens when there is no available land and there are major funding problems. Any new state bond must address that historic urban versus rural school funding problem.

Starbird: If a school person is asked, 'Would you like some money to build a school?' By nature, they will say yes. In the same way, if you ask a city, 'Would you like some money for a library?' We say yes. If that piecemeal approach is the one that this new state bond takes, we will miss out on an enormous opportunity to incorporate a number of new facets into the school construction framework and a real mechanism for diversifying use and funding.

With the Edison Pacific school we initially began with the thought that we would incorporate housing into the project. In the end we decided not to, but the mere exercise of looking at a low-income housing component allowed us to investigate the funding possibilities that housing would bring to a school project. If the state approached the bond with the same perspective, they might build incentives and priorities into a bond fund and say, 'If you're just drawing on our bond money for schools, you're going to have a lesser shot than if you look at multiple uses and multiple sources of funding. But, if you're a school district who has done schools and libraries or housing and redevelopment and you've tapped housing money, redevelopment money, general fund money, local bonds and state bonds, we're going to give you a greater share and a higher priority for funding.' That would be the ideal situation.

My fear is that the state, as it has done historically, will look at an education bond with blinders on and be as tunnel-visioned and silent in education as they are on streets. Local municipalities have become very adept at leveraging state money because they know that any single source won't do the trick. It's time for the state to realize that that kind of multi-funding/multi-use approach must be incorporated into state funding programs.

One last question. Cities, school districts and others have an opportunity to express themselves up in the Capitol, to lobby their district representatives as well as the Legislature. But one might reasonably conclude that there's a disconnect between the themes that you've just articulated and those driving policy in the Capitol. Are your priorities adequately being advanced in Sacramento? Because it doesn't appear so?

Brown: We have to deal with a longstanding reality here. Most years funding has been tight and the thoughts of Superintendents and City Managers are on self-preservation. It hasn't been until fairly recently-within the last five or six years-that we've begun to realize that our problems are not going to be solved without thinking in a more systemic way. We've begun to realize that we are not going to get better schools without better neighborhoods. And we're not going to get better neighborhoods without better schools.

We've communicated that message to our legislators. But maybe we didn't make the case well enough. Maybe what we said was that this project needs help or that project needs help. Maybe what we should have said was that it was time to refocus the entire discussion about funding and create a different funding mechanism that integrates neighborhoods and schools together.

Starbird: Jack Scott, Dario Frommer and Carol Liu are great representatives and have done very well for us. But, they are also small cogs in a big wheel. There are dynamics at the state level created by interest groups and competing lobbyists that have a significant impact on what takes place up there. To combat that will take a significant mind shift.