City of Westminster: Parks, Recreation, and Libraries Master Plan - Advancing Diversity and Social Change Award
Westminster’s Parks, Recreation, and Library (PRL) system represents the City’s most highly rated assets and services per recent and historical Community Survey results. This valued infrastructure provides opportunities for recreation, health, education, flood control, wildfire mitigation, connectedness, and belonging. The PRL system was the result of many deliberate actions over the last 50 years. As the City has matured from an undeveloped, greenfield community to a built-out community, there emerged a significant need to reassess community needs, preferences, and ensure the PRL system supports current and future residents with a high quality of life.
Just as the City of Westminster is experiencing a shift from growth and expansion to redevelopment and infill, the PRL Department is experiencing this same paradigm shift from an expanding system to a mature system in which the Department’s focus will be to upgrade and maintain existing assets. Opportunities to expand programs and provide new amenities will primarily be explored through partnerships, along with creative funding and operational solutions.
The PRL Vision Plan is the first comprehensive department-wide plan that brings all PRL services under a single operational framework. This pioneering plan balances the financial realities of a built-out city with limited opportunities for additional revenues or significant developer contributions for new amenities with the need to continuously maintain the extensive system of assets and programs. Through technical analyses, the Plan documents resource considerations such as funding and staff capacity limitations to present a realistic and hopeful vision for the PRL system for the next 10 to 20 years. The scale of Westminster’s PRL system is vast, totaling $1.29 billion in assets, not including land value, with thousands of acres of parks, golf courses, and open spaces, over one hundred miles of trails, and a variety of services from arts and culture to libraries and human services.
Furthermore, the Vision Plan used Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s (CDPHE) Enviroscreen tool to identify Disproportionately Impacted (DI) communities to help define where the City needs to prioritize PRL investment. One such DI community within the City is Historic Westminster. CDPHE has classified Historic Westminster as a Disproportionately Impacted Community, based on multiple public health and environmental factors. This neighborhood faces changing demographics with more seniors, immigrants, and young adults seeking affordable places to start families. Active engagement with residents has helped rethink how those third spaces can meet changing needs including multimodal transportation and environmental-quality interventions as well as PRL investments.
Though only recently adopted in March 2025, the PRL Vision Plan is already showing its effectiveness by influencing the City’s budgeting decisions, staffing, and the development of the PRL Department’s annual workplan. An example of the plan already at work is the lawn transformation project will convert the City’s non-functional turf, especially at parks and recreation facilities, to native low-water landscapes as recommended by the Plan.
