NRPA and UPARR: how NRPA helped to bring about the Urban Park and Recreation Recovery Program. (History: UPARR at 25).

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the creation of the Urban Park and Recreation Recovery Program (UPARR). Throughout the year, Parks & Recreation will highlight the history and accomplishments, and look at the future, of this crucial program. As we go to press, the continued legislative and executive branch support for UPARR is unclear. We hope that learning more about UPARR's history will motivate you to work with your federal legislators to ensure its future.

Eric Redman's 1978 book, The Dance of Legislation, portrayed in great detail the exhaustive--and exhausting--work that went into passing a single piece of legislation. Redman was writing about the National Health Service Bill, but he would have found just as rich of a subject a few years later if he had written about the Byzantine path that led to the 1978 enactment of the Urban Park and Recreation Recovery Program (UPARR). Throughout the dance of this particular piece of legislation toward passage, NRPA was intimately involved.

"There's no question that NRPA was the principal nonprofit group, conceptually and actively, in bring UPARR to life," says Barry Tindall, NRPA's director of public policy, who was NRPA's main point person on what became UPARR. "NRPA wrote the language in a piece of legislation that called for a study of the condition of urban recreation. It was that study that led to the creation of UPARR."

Starting With a Study

The study Tindall refers to came about because of increasing dissatisfaction with the scope of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), established in 1964. "When the LWCF landed on the scene, there was aggressive land acquisition and preservation activity," Tindall recalls. "LWCF didn't have much money, and the vast majority of what there was was going to suburbia. The suburbs hall the matching funds, the infrastructure and the statutes needed."

In addition, according to Tindall, "two-thirds of the state side of LWCF was going for development. The West didn't want more public land, but they wanted development on what they had. Pretty quickly, a lot of people started asking, `Hey, what about the cities?'" Working with coalition partners such as the Heritage Conservation and Recreation Foundation, NRPA set out to get congressional authorization for an urban-recreation needs assessment.

"The need for a special category for urban recreation was a pretty easy case to make," Tindall says. That was especially true because one of the 26 studies conducted by the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission in the early 1960s had been about urban recreation, and had strongly highlighted the special needs of urban recreation. Given societal trends, those needs had only become stronger in the intervening years. In 1978, then, the National Urban Recreation Study noted that urban recreation needed help beyond land acquisition. After all, many urban areas had a rich history of parks and recreation spaces; the problem, increasingly, was deterioration of the already-built environment (parks and playgrounds). The study recommended creation of a grants-in-aid program to restore the built environment, help recreational authorities plan for future development and provide recreational services to economically stressed neighborhoods.

Congressional Cooperation

Once the need for federal resources dedicated to urban recreation was reestablished, UPARR's path became especially circuitous, more a demonstration of the old saw about the undesirability of watching sausage and legislation being made than an example for a civics textbook.

First, Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) held a hearing on the topic. Metzenbaum, Tindall recalls, "was a real urban parks advocate. Every Saturday when he was home, away from Washington, he went to a garden market. There, he got to know the director of Cleveland parks and recreation, and morphed into a strong advocate for parks and recreation. Also, an NRPA trustee had a brother who worked for Metzenbaum. Those kinds of connections never hurt."

Metzenbaum's hearing attracted few other senators, but the witness room was full, and the TV presence was heavy. The crowds and cameras were there to see the only two witnesses--baseball Hall of Famer Willie Mays and professional basketball star Wes Unseld, of the then-Washington Bullets. "The hearing went great," Tindall says, "but nothing came of it. The Senate committee never did anything else with the bill."

But if Metzenbaum's hearing seemed to have little lasting effect, the same could be said for the Senate committee's lack of action on the bill. That's because the late Rep. Phil Burton (D-Calif.) was at work in the House of Representatives.

"He Loved to Legislate"

"Phil Burton was probably the most aggressive legislator in the House," Tindall says. "He loved to legislate, and he loved to buy land. He was from the Bay Area, one of those places that in the 60s and 70s was a hotbed of interest in parks and recreation. He would go around asking, `Is there any place you want to make a national recreation area?' Obviously, he was a good guy to have on our side." Moreover, as chair of the House subcommittee that oversaw parks, recreation and public land, Burton was in a position to act on his intentions.

While on Capitol Hill one day, Tindall ran into Burton, and started to advocate on behalf of urban recreation. The busy Burton said, "I want to buy land. When we get closer to where I can be useful, come see me." Soon after, Tindall was in Burton's office.

As often happens, much of Congress's appropriations work that year took the form of omnibus bills, hundreds of pages long and full of particulars. "Burton had put together an omnibus parks and recreation act," Tindall says, "with 13 or more titles in it. [Each title in a bill pertains to one subject matter.] And there were four additions to it. It was huge. Well, Title XI was UPARR. The House never had a hearing on it, but there it was in the bill!"

Again, despite Metzenbaum's hearing, there was no UPARR provision in the Senate version of the omnibus spending bill. That didn't matter once the bill went to conference committee of the two chambers. "Burton was a domineering guy," Tindall simply says. "He always prevailed." Besides, support for something like UPARR was relatively easy to muster at the time, according to Tindall. "You had legislators like Dan Rostenkowski from Chicago, people who were really into urban parks. There was fervent activity on parks, a national trail system, things like that."

Meanwhile, President Carter had proposed a major economic stimulus package. The package contained a strong urban infrastructure element, including parks. "Congress bashed his package," says Tindall. "UPARR was the only urban infrastructure element that made it through."

In November 1978, Carter signed UPARR into law as a stand-alone complement to the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

Parks & Recreation wants to hear from NRPA members that have used UPARR grants. Contact Scott Douglas at sdouglas @nrpa.org.