Public parks play consequential roles in local communities. Parks can
raise property values, encourage or inhibit sprawl, and promote health, safety,
and social cohesion. The decision to create a park affects development in the
surrounding area and dictates which residents can easily access the property's
new amenities-and which residents cannot.
Yet, public stakeholders are given few signposts in making and monitoring
public park acquisitions. Data on new parkland is scarce; moreover, the legal
framework undergirding the process is poorly understood and rarely explored,
particularly at the local government level. Although local governments are
America's leading stewards and gatekeepers of public park property, the
actions of a parks department when acquiring new land receive bare direction
from the formal legal regime and little attention from legal scholars. Instead,
state law and judicial precedent grants almost unconstrained local discretion
when acquiring parkland, a framework that delegates lawmaking to the lowest
level of governance: to the local and sublocal institutions whose internal
policies and unwritten practices determine what parkland is acquired, how
potential land acquisitions are reviewed, and which stakeholders and priorities
carry most weight in the process. Viewed as a whole, these policies and
practices constitute an informal, heterogeneous legal regime of local parkland
acquisition