Visitor Experience & Infrastructure
Healthy & Socially Thriving
Open Space & Mountain Parks
FY2025 Budget
Program Budget Overview
Description
The Visitor Experience & Infrastructure program supports the OSMP mission and focuses primarily in the realm of responsible recreation, stewardship and enjoyment. Through the work of a variety of teams, staff annually complete the design, construction, and management of OSMP’s physical infrastructure related to visitor experience and infrastructure. The program also includes a subprogram area related to Recreation and Cultural Stewardship which has a major focus on recreation management, historic and cultural resources, and human dimensions. This sub program compliments the infrastructure teams through strategic recreation management, critical data gathering, synthesis and analysis to inform decision-making and management activities and ensures the long-term preservation of historic and cultural resources. The team is responsible for managing OSMP’s trails network, signs and graphics, trailheads, and other access points; office buildings and other structures across the open space system; the department’s equipment and vehicle assets; cultural resources on the system; and research around visitor use and impacts.
Summary of 2025 Budget Enhancements and Realignments:
1) Addition of two fixed-term, grant-funded positions to coordinate the Mount Sanitas Trail Improvement Project.
2) Base cost increases to account for living wage adjustments to temporary positions.
Visitor Experience & Infrastructure Subprograms:
Facilities
The Facilities subprogram provides for the strategic planning, operations, management, construction, and renovation of all OSMP facilities including agricultural, recreation, and operational structures.
Fleet
Fleet delivers professional equipment and fleet services to the department staff to support all the services that OSMP delivers. This includes consultation with OSMP staff, technical assistance, and management to enhance the department's operations.
Recreation & Cultural Stewardship
Recreation & Cultural Stewardship in OSMP includes recreation management, historic and cultural resources stewardship, and human dimensions work. This sub-program is responsible for understanding, caring for, and promoting the recreational, scenic, and cultural well-being of open space lands within a department-wide context. It identifies and protects cultural, prehistoric, and paleontological resources on OSMP system. Human dimensions provides research, analysis, consultation, and technical assistance that helps inform management decisions and actions to enhance visitor experiences and resource protection on OSMP properties.
Visitor Infrastructure
Visitor Infrastructure in OSMP includes trails stewardship, trailhead maintenance, and signs/graphics displays. Trail stewardship performs yearly maintenance of the existing trail system, as well as constructing new trails and coordinates large scale projects to make existing trails more sustainable. This includes fence repair, ADA access, cleaning infrastructure, vegetation management, and constructing new trailheads or updating existing trailheads to meet visitor demand. Trailhead maintenance performs ongoing janitorial maintenance at trailheads. This sub-program also designs, constructs, and installs educational, regulatory, and informational signs. Within the Visitor Infrastructure budget sub-program is also funding for project management. Three staff within this sub-program provide strategic work related to the feasibility studies, strategic work planning, design and construction of various assets across the system. The team annually implements various actions and projects from a variety of plans to provide new infrastructure, major renovation of existing infrastructure and careful integration of all aspects of ecological values and visitor experience.
