Two Years Later: How the Great American Outdoors Act Is Addressing Park Access

As a kid, Chris Urias frequented a park two blocks from his home in Montbello, a suburb of Denver. He’d relax in the sprawling field and stare out at the mountain peaks fringing the horizon. Sometimes Urias joined a nearby game of pickup basketball. Other days, he reclined on empty bleachers and watched kids dribble a soccer ball. 

He relished how easy it was to walk to this park with his family or ride his skateboard to ones farther away. Now an adult, he recognizes the privilege of having grown up so close to green space. That isn’t the case for everyone in Montbello.  

That’s why, several years ago, Urias began working as a youth leader for ELK Education Center, a local organization helping to plan and design the Montbello Open Space Park. The 5.5-acre green space opened last summer in a section of town that’s historically lacked close-to-home outdoor access. Now, an estimated 3,725 residents are within a 10-minute walk. And it has all the things Urias would have loved as a kid: a bouldering wall, ropes course, outdoor classroom and paved trails that ribbon through the park’s prairie grass.  

“This park is [meant for] play, but also to learn and to enjoy nature in a different way,” Urias said.  

The ELK Education Center and Trust for Public Land, an organization that creates parks and protects land for people, built the area using a grant from the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), a program developed in 1964 that reinvests royalties from offshore oil and gas leasing into creating green spaces.  

Parks are important fixtures for communities. Research shows that time outside benefits both mental and physical health. It can lower the risk of depression, improve recovery from psychological stress and increase focus and attention. Parks also benefit public health—trees in urban parks remove up to about 7 million tons of toxins from the air annually. They also help cool cities, which is increasingly important as the climate warms. 

But across the country, many cities and suburbs lack safe, quality parks that they can easily get to. In the U.S., about 70% of low-income communities live in nature-deprived areas. Programs like LWCF provide money to make existing spaces safer and cleaner, or to add new parks in areas lacking them.  

In its first five decades, LWCF has funded more than 40,000 outdoor programs, including grants to expand parks in underserved and urban areas like Montbello. The money also helps address the quality of outdoor spaces, which is uneven across communities.  

In 2020, LWCF became permanently and fully funded at $900 million each year as part of the passage of the Great American Outdoors Act, landmark legislation that dedicated billions to public lands, including money to address the deferred maintenance and repair needs at national parks. In the past, the fund’s money was discretionary and much of it was diverted to other projects, leaving towns with less to spend.  

It’s been more than two years since the program became fully funded, and some believe the program has made solid strides in helping improve existing green spaces and make parks accessible to more people. Let’s take a look at what it’s achieved—and what barriers still exist.  

How It’s Doing 

Every Fourth of July, kids in Prospect, Kentucky, gather in the grass at Cowley Park. Once the sun slips below the horizon, the sky comes to life with fireworks. After the holiday, the park is where people flock to watch a summer festival or lounge in the grass on a humid Midwestern day. 

What residents can’t do here—or at any other park in Prospect—is meander down walking paths or push their children on playground swings. Many parks are also not accessible to strollers or wheelchairs. There are only four parks in the area, and none of them has much beyond grass and a few miles of trail. 

Soon, though, that will change. 

Thanks to a grant from LWCF, Prospect is turning one of those grassy areas—Little Hunting Creek Park—into a place for regular recreation, adding a pavilion, new lighting and a small playground. Notably, the trails will be wide and flat enough for wheelchairs and strollers. Eventually, the town of Prospect will install a walkway that connects to more distant neighborhoods, allowing more residents to walk to the park.  

“The [parks] near Prospect were not accessible for persons with disabilities or really, super young children,” says Sarah O’Dell, a former council member who led funding efforts for Little Hunting Creek Park. “The whole accessibility gap was happening around us. It was an opportunity to make something completely accessible.” 

Some communities depend on funds like LWCF to make these upgrades possible, especially because parks departments are prone to suffering budget cuts when cities tighten their belts. Linda Hwang, senior director of strategy and innovation for Trust for Public Land, says that, in a 2021 survey, two-thirds of parks departments in the 100 largest cities reported budget cuts at an average of 10% each. Even towns like Prospect, one of the wealthiest communities in Kentucky, can benefit from the federal money. 

Since receiving permanent funding, LWCF allocates the full $900 million each year to improve green spaces, including national parks and forests. Before GAOA passed, the then–partially funded program distributed a fraction of that. For instance, it distributed $306 million and $402 million in 2015 and 2017, respectively.   

Another beneficiary of the money is the Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership (ORLP), an extension of LWCF that earmarks its funds for underserved communities. In 2014, the year ORLP was established, the program was funded at $3 million. An analysis by the Trust for Public Land revealed that parks primarily serving people of color are, on average, half the size of green spaces used by majority-white communities—they’re also used by nearly five times the number of people. By comparison, research shows that people living in affluent, majority-white municipalities have access to higher-quality park systems.  

So far in 2022, it’s been funded at $110 million. Its benefits are far-reaching—in 2021, the National Park Service distributed $16 million of these funds across 13 states to improve or create places for recreation, particularly in low-income areas.  

And this funding accomplishes more than revitalizing outdoor spaces, Hwang says. It reinforces to communities that time outside matters. 

Work in Progress 

Now that LWCF is fully funded, it’s distributing more money to communities across the country. But while there’s more money available, barriers still exist for communities applying for it. There are a few reasons for this.  

First, many communities don’t know that the funds exist or that they qualify. 

“The most difficult part was learning what we were eligible for and searching it out,” O’Dell says of applying for Little Hunting Creek Park’s grant. She adds that there’s also a hesitancy to apply for the money—an undertaking that can involve significant time and preparation—that a city may not receive. 

Amy Lindholm, coalition manager, says there’s work to be done publicizing the program and sharing how it works—so far, the LWCF Coalition has partnered with organizations in various states to host educational webinar series, listening sessions and other teaching opportunities. Still, the process of applying for the funding can vary by state, which can complicate efforts to educate communities on how to apply. 

“There’s definitely bottlenecks throughout the system, like any program,” Lindholm says. “We’re working to understand where they are and how to ease them.”  

The funding timeline can also be a challenge for some cities because it’s difficult to plan so far in advance for money they may or may not receive. For instance, O’Dell explains that her team first applied for the money for Little Hunting Creek Park in March 2021, and learned during summer 2022 that they’d been awarded it. However, the funds won’t be released until the fall.  

“You have to have foresight,” she explains. “Fiscal years are difficult for governments to approve, much less to think two budgets ahead.” 

Securing Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership money can be a particular challenge since communities must match the donation dollar for dollar, whether through private donations or city funds. However, the communities most in need of the money often struggle to do this. 

“Underserved communities are likely to be the ones with the least resources and have trouble coming up with a match,” Lindholm explained. 

One potential solution is to give the secretary of the Department of the Interior the discretion to waive the match requirement. The Outdoors for All Act, a bipartisan bill that would support outdoor recreational opportunities in urban and low-income communities, includes a provision that would give the secretary this ability to waive the condition if a community demonstrates that the project is a local priority. The proposed legislation is awaiting action in the Senate. 

Removing the need for a match would make it possible for more communities to pursue the funding, said Alex Schaefer, senior legislative representative for the Trust for Public Land. This could expand who applies for the money—thereby diversifying the communities who benefit, she added.  

But despite the challenges LWCF has faced in its first couple years, the sentiment among partners is that there’s progress. 

“When we’re talking about urban areas and land use, I wouldn’t refer to anything as easy,” Schaefer said. “There are kinks that are getting worked out, but everyone continues to be more focused on getting the funds into the communities that would benefit the most.”