Parks Spending
What it costs to run Vacaville's parks, per park and per acre.
These are deliberately simple, objective metrics — not a perfect cost model. The goal is to give residents and commissioners intuitive numbers they can reason about: roughly what does a park cost, and how does spending compare across parks of different sizes.
Parks money lives in three places in the budget, so looking at only the "Parks & Recreation Department" line undercounts the real cost by nearly half. The totals below combine all three.
Where the money is
Programs, classes, aquatics, community & sports centers, administration.
Mowing, irrigation, turf, and playground upkeep on general-fund parks.
Per-neighborhood landscaping & lighting upkeep funded by parcel assessments.
Per-park direct maintenance
Direct services & supplies for each Lighting & Landscaping assessment zone (FY2025-26), joined to GIS acreage. This is the closest thing to a per-park line item the city publishes — it excludes shared salaries and indirect costs, so use it for comparing parks to each other, not for absolute cost.
| Park / Zone | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Andrews Park | $280,608 | 16.4 | $17,110 |
| Regency Zone (SBL/Cooper Park) | $269,649 | 6.6 | $40,856 |
| North Orchard Park | $246,314 | 7.6 | $32,410 |
| Alamo Creek Park | $246,279 | 9.6 | $25,654 |
| Gentry Meadowlands Park non-park | $237,947 | — | — |
| Ridgeview Zone (SBL/Park) | $231,866 | 8.1 | $28,625 |
| Orange Tree Business Park SBL non-park | $211,994 | — | — |
| Browns Valley Zone (SBL/Park) | $210,765 | 3.9 | $54,042 |
| Nelson Park | $162,778 | 11.4 | $14,279 |
| Patwin Park | $150,575 | 3.3 | $45,629 |
| Padan Park | $135,815 | 6.4 | $21,221 |
| Fairmont Beelard Park | $123,915 | 5.4 | $22,947 |
| Hawkins (Valley Oak) Park | $114,008 | 3.6 | $31,669 |
| Trower Park | $102,641 | 4.1 | $25,034 |
| Gentry Meadowlands SBL non-park | $89,743 | — | — |
| Stonegate SBL | $87,021 | 6.0 | $14,504 |
| Cambridge Park | $80,048 | 3.8 | $21,065 |
| Willows/Gramercy Park | $72,625 | 2.0 | $36,312 |
| Prairie Rose SBL non-park | $36,739 | — | — |
| Park Maintenance District (master) non-park | $33,385 | — | — |
| Country Village SBL non-park | $22,710 | — | — |
| Vaca Valley Industrial Pk SBL non-park | $18,219 | — | — |
| Stonegate/Regency DB non-park | $14,297 | — | — |
| Vaca Valley Business Pk SBL non-park | $8,340 | — | — |
| Vaca Valley Business Drainage non-park | $233 | — | — |
How to read these numbers
- Cost per park hides size. A pocket park and a regional park both count as one. Cost per acre is the fairer peer comparison.
- Not every assessment zone is a park. Some are business-park or drainage districts, marked "non-park" above and excluded from the park metrics.
- Per-zone direct cost is not fully loaded. Shared staff salaries and indirect costs aren't pushed down to individual parks, so these figures understate true per-park cost.
- Acreage is computed from the city's GIS polygon geometry, not a published park inventory, so a few parks may differ slightly from signage.
Sources
- Budget figures: City of Vacaville FY2025-26 Final Budget Document — Parks & Recreation Department, Parks Maintenance Division (Public Works), and Lighting & Landscaping Districts (printed p.123).
- Acreage: City of Vacaville GIS parks shapefile, areas computed from polygon geometry (State Plane CA Zone II, US survey feet).
- Reproducible: parsing scripts in
scripts/regenerate_data/parks_metrics.ymleach budget cycle.