Why Denver Is Funding Pickleball Courts Amid Budget Cuts

Members of Denver City Council were scratching their heads when a budget item to fund pickleball court construction came before the Finance & Governance Committee on March 5.

The council questioned why the city would give new pickleball courts $2 million after funding for Parks & Recreation center hours and programming had just been cut due to a budget crunch from an influx of migrants. Denver's Parks & Recreation Department, still dealing with the fallout, expected those questions, according to executive director Jolon Clark.

The department isn’t pulling general fund dollars for pickleball courts, Clark explained. Rather, Parks & Recreation asked the city council if it could reallocate money from the Parks Legacy Fund that was slated for the Civic Center Park Theater Project. Because the Civic Center project's construction was delayed, the parks department found itself with $3 million that would roll over into next year's budget if it went unspent.

Parks & Rec is proposing to give $1 million of that amount to complete the design laid out in the La Alma-Lincoln Park Vision Plan, which was created in 2023 to provide the west Denver park with a new amphitheater, culture and exercise loop, picnic grove and enhanced lighting, among other improvements.

Completing planned pickleball court construction at Rosamond Park would receive the other $2 million under the department’s proposal. The plan is to add four courts to the southeast Denver park, which is getting a complete makeover thanks to two rounds of bond funding. The park will also receive a new playground and basketball courts as part of the project.

As Clark explained to councilmembers, those dollars cannot go back into the general fund.

The Parks Legacy Fund was approved by Denver voters in 2018 and established a 0.25 percent sales tax to be used exclusively for acquiring new park space, developing and maintaining parks, restoring and protecting waterways, purchasing and caring for trees or operating and maintaining capital improvements to the city’s parks. (The city is currently soliciting feedback on a new five-year plan for the fund.)

City-run rec centers and Department of Motor Vehicles operating hours, restricted as part of Mayor Mike Johnston's first round of budget cuts in response to the migrant crisis, aren't eligible for the available funding.

“When you look at what can be repositioned to fill other holes in the city as we have this humanitarian crisis happening and then you look at what funds can be used to fill the hole that it's creating in Parks & Recreation, the funds that we're talking about today are not funds that can be used to do either of those things,” Clark said. “Instead of letting those sit in a bank account and do nothing, we're trying to also be proactive with those.”

The committee voted unanimously to move the proposed budget shifts forward to a vote by the full council within the coming weeks.

Moving the funds won’t impact the scope of the Civic Center Program, as the department plans to reallocate funds for that in the 2025 budget cycle; neither Clark nor councilmembers specified why construction has been delayed, though a design contract wasn't awarded until late in 2023. But doing so will allow the department to finish the official planning for the La Alma-Lincoln Park project all at once rather than in phases, and therefore be able to compete for an Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership Grant worth $6.7 million from the National Park Service, according to Clark.

In addition, giving the $2 million to Rosamond Park now means that the city can save money on the project, as the same contractor putting pickleball courts at Lowry Sports Complex Park can be used for the Rosamond project, he explained.

Councilmembers, through conversations with the parks department prior to the meeting and in response to Clark’s presentation, understood that the funds couldn’t be applied to Parks & Rec programming or rec center hours, but they still questioned how budget decisions were made.

“I would like to know more detail about the equity work that's being done around the rec center closures, because I'm really, really concerned about those,” Councilmember Sarah Parady said. “They're one of our front-line youth violence prevention strategies.”

Parks & Rec was included in the first round of budget cuts along with the Department of Motor Vehicles because it wanted to avoid deeper cuts by spreading its lost dollars out over a longer time frame, Clark said.

“We wanted to make sure that the impact for all of our residents was as shallow as possible, and moving a little bit quicker than the rest of the budget process allowed us to do that,” he added.

The parks department worked with the Mayor’s Office of Social Equity and Innovation to determine how to make cuts most equitably, with a particular focus on preserving as much youth programming as possible. Additionally, the department used an equity mapping tool to identify geographic areas of the city with higher areas of need, Clark said.

He estimated that over 70 percent of the dollars the department will spend this year will go to places of high need. Parks & Rec also considered the youth population by mainly opening recreation centers later rather than closing them earlier, Clark added, because it knows children are more likely to go to a recreation center after school than before.

In the end, the department reduced spring recreation programming by 25 percent, cut regional recreation centers from seven days to six on a rotating schedule and reduced hours of operation at local and neighborhood recreation centers. It also decided not to plant flower beds in the city this year and has issued a moratorium on event permit applications at city-owned parks.

There are currently over 30,000 paid members in Denver’s recreation center system and more than 100,000 free MY Denver and MY Denver PRIME memberships for Denver's youth and residents age sixty and over.

Councilmember Darrell Watson asked whether more active senior programming could be added back to rec centers after Mayor Mike Johnston announced on February 28 that the estimated $180 million newcomer budget would be lowered to $120 million — but Clark warned that more cuts are still coming.

“We will look back at every opportunity that we have to do that,” Clark said of considering older adults. “As these things evolve, and as part of a much broader picture, those are not the only cuts that will have to come from the Parks & Recreation budget to meet a target as big as $140 to $180 million.”