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The district fights nearly daily new outbreaks of graffiti and vandalism. It means hundreds of hours of additional work and thousands in costs.

The district told us that last year it dedicated 974 hours of staff time on graffiti and vandalism cleanup. The district was at 360 hours as of Thursday for this year with $13,073.33 in total cost.

A different story in the budget is a set of disquieted metrics. With some of its performance measures, the park district is swimming against the tide.

The district wants to be a leader in environmental stewardship and set as a goal: completion of restoration projects along the river. It aims to ensure “district services are accessible to all� by completing a list of 377 Americans with Disabilities Act projects over time. Those performance measures seem reasonably well in hand.

Two other measures of level of service are both a kind of an enlightened consensus of how a park district should grow to serve the community.

One is a level of service for parks. The goal is for the district to have 7.85 acres of neighborhood and community park per 1,000 people. For bigger regional parks, such as Shevlin Park, the goal is to have 10 acres of parks per 1,000 people.

The second is for trails. The district has one metric for the overall total miles of trails. It also has one set at 1 mile of trail per 1,000 people.

Bend parks is meeting its target for regional parks, though the park acreage per 1,000 people has been in decline. It was 10.51 in 2023. The district is not meeting its goal for neighborhood and community parks per 1,000. It was 7.35 in 2023.

Trail miles have been growing and hit 97.64 in 2023. Trail miles per 1,000 people was at .90 miles in 2023.

The weight against them is the growth of Bend’s population and Oregon’s land use laws that aim to have communities to grow in and up, and not out. To win, to meet its parks and trails and people metrics, the district needs to win four times.

The district does have other metrics it looks at, too, including the distance and obstacles people have to traverse to walk to a park and the demographic data of people near parks, Michelle Healy, the district’s new executive director, told us.

Many of these metrics, as wisely chosen as they are, are metrics that could be headed for conflicts with Bend’s infilling development. When the district is asked in the future to sacrifice revenue for worthy causes such as affordable housing, these metrics can impel an anxious response.