Key trends and issues impacting local government recreation and park administration in the 1990s.

摘要

The problem. The problem was to determine the key societal, managerial, and leisure trends and issues impacting local government recreation and park administration in the 1990s.;Procedures. The Delphi technique was used to elicit opinions from a jury of 36 experts from the American Academy for Park and Recreation Administration and the Academy for Leisure Sciences. Over 650 trends and issues suggested by jurors in the first round, were condensed into 106 unique trends and 89 unique issues. These items were rated as to their impact over two consensus-building rounds, which narrowed them down to 11 key trends and 13 key issues having the highest ratings. In a follow-up round, jurors suggested implications to those key trends and solutions to the key issues. Data were analyzed using descriptive and parametric statistics generated by the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS-X).;Findings. Five key trends were of an extreme impact, requiring immediate response by the profession: deteriorating park and recreation infrastructure; increasing crime; declining park and recreation budgets; increasing competition for shrinking tax resources; and massive public sector debt.;Five key issues were also of an extreme impact: how to ensure adequate capital development finance; what spending priorities should be set in the face of budget cuts or when services were stretched too thin; how to make parks safe places; how can public parks and recreation strengthen its political position and shape the future through affecting state and national policy; and how to compete successfully for funding against other community services.;Conclusions. Generally if key trends were not responded to the implications were reduced citizen use, with subsequent downsizing of local government park and recreation services.;Solutions to key issues were to focus on: local public involvement and constituency building, inter-organizational cooperation and goal setting; building manager's political, communication, and business skills; researching and articulating the benefits of recreation and parks to the community; and increasing focus on disadvantaged populations.