Last Thursday, dozens of children celebrated their first day of summer break, running through the splash pad, climbing on the nature-themed playground and playing pickleball on the newly paved courts at Ezell Park in Mint Hill.
The 91-acre park had opened that morning after years of planning and construction. For Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation Director Nick Walker, it was a rare occasion. In his nearly 10-year career as a park director (six of which were in Memphis, Tenn.), Ezell Park is only the second park he’s opened.
"This should happen more often," he told the town at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. "The realities of our world mean that we can't do this every day."
Residents packed into Ezell Park that day, but the demand for parks extends far beyond Mint Hill’s borders. Across Mecklenburg County, people regularly ask for more green space. The question is: Why aren’t there more parks, and what makes building them such a lengthy process?
With budget constraints, pressure to acquire land while it’s still available, irreversible city design decisions made in the 1960s and the balancing act of community wants and needs, Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation needs more time than what’s realistic to keep up with the region’s growth.
The perception that Mecklenburg is falling behind in building parks was underscored this month, when the latest study from the Trust for Public Land ranked Mecklenburg’s park system 90th out of 100 of the country’s most populated cities. The study examines, among other factors, the percentage of residents who live within a 10-minute walk of a park, park size and park spending.
County officials have pushed back on parts of the ranking’s methodology, arguing it does not fully capture Mecklenburg’s investments in greenways, land acquisition and capital projects.
But county leaders agree that the underlying challenge in Mecklenburg is trying to add parks in one of the fastest-growing regions in the country while competing with development, rising land prices and decades of planning decisions that have left some communities with no recreational areas nearby.
A challenge decades in the making
When looking at many of the park systems that consistently rank near the top nationally, there’s one major difference, says Bert Lynn, capital planning division director for Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation, which oversees parks and recreational facilities throughout the county, including Charlotte as well as Mecklenburg’s six towns.
Many were planned generations ago.
Cities like Boston, New York and even Savannah began planning major public park systems more than a century ago, and as those cities grew, parks were incorporated into the broader vision for growth.
Charlotte’s development – as it often does – followed a different path.
“Our first parks master plan was completed in the 1960s,” Lynn said.
“We’ve always been trying to go in and find a location for a park around the other things that have already happened,” Lynn added. “Whereas in other areas, you're building around those spaces.”
Development patterns in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to today’s park-access gaps, Lynn said. During that period, many communities moved away from requiring developers to create public park space and instead relied on homeowner associations and private amenities.
For much of the past two decades, Mecklenburg County's land acquisition efforts focused on expanding greenway connections, Lynn said. Many of the park projects now being completed were first identified in a 2007 master plan and funded through a $250M bond package approved by voters in 2008. Nearly 20 years later, he said, all of those original bond-funded projects are either complete or under construction.
In an ideal Charlotte – and one that the Trust for Public Land observes in the study and shapes the county’s ultimate goal – every resident should be within a 10-minute walk of a park. There are large swaths of Mecklenburg County that don’t reach that standard yet, which is something both the county and the Trust for Public Land agree on.
In 2021, the county developed what it calls the “Meck Playbook,” a long-range master plan that includes a list of priority projects and identifies 17 areas with significant park and recreation gaps, like Mint Hill, for example, that prompted Ezell Park. The county is updating the plan through a five-year review process, but Lynn said the goal is to fully reassess and refresh the playbook every 10 years.
“If you look at the mapping that the Trust for Public Land kind of does as part of their work, a lot of those high-need areas coincide with our gap areas,” Lynn said. “We're all familiar with the same places that need these spaces.”
According to TPL's study, about 40% of Charlotte-Mecklenburg County residents live within a 10-minute walk of a park, compared to nationwide, where TPL reports 76% of residents of the 100 most populous cities live within a 10-minute walk of a park.
Areas that have been identified as “access gaps” are scattered across the county, largely in lower-density areas of Charlotte and surrounding towns like Cornelius and Davidson, Pineville, Matthews and Mint Hill.
Mecklenburg County first purchased the Mint Hill property for Ezell Park in 2001 from local farmers for about $2M. Now, nearly 25 years and an additional $8.5M later, it’s the first county-run park for Mint Hill residents, and one of only three parks in the area after Veterans Memorial Park and Wilson Grove Park, according to Mint Hill Mayor Dale Dalton.
“I think this will be the shiny star of Mint Hill for what the county has done. … There's no way a town can spend that kind of money without the county community that helps. I mean, that's... about two-thirds of our budget,” Dalton said during the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Building and opening new parks in Mecklenburg County is not as common as one might think.
The race for land
Identifying the need is the first step. Finding the land is second.
At the Ezell Park grand opening, County Commissioner Susan Rodriguez-McDowell told The Ledger that county commissioners “definitely feel that pressure” to acquire land as development continues and available property becomes scarcer. “Prices, you know, are going up, so I do think it is a race with developers.”
Although it may not take as long in every other case, for Ezell Park, land that was acquired 25 years ago is just now being turned into a park. Sure, there were other factors involved, like the recession and the park being pushed down the priority list, but it also just takes time – three to four years, in the ideal situation – for parks to get built because of the park department’s budget.
The county has made land acquisition a major priority in recent years. The Mecklenburg park system’s budget is broken out into different categories, meaning the money for land acquisition is in a different bucket than money for park construction and renovation.
Up until about six years ago, the county’s annual budget allotted only $6M or $7M for new land purchases for parks and recreational facilities. But in 2023, the park department received $50M for land acquisition. Budgets for this past year and next year allot $30 million annually for new land.
“I’ve been a part of a board where we really emphasized land acquisition,” Rodriguez-McDowell said. “We really try to … protect the land that we have purchased, trying to put in place preservation measures to make sure that it doesn’t get taken for other purposes later.”
In Mecklenburg County, the median price per acre is $134,475. In dense suburban areas of Charlotte, prices can exceed $500,000 per acre. The county finds land by either searching the market, contacting owners of parcels that would fit the county’s goal area for a new park and asking if they’ll sell, or responding when landowners reach out because they want their property preserved as parkland rather than developed. Oftentimes, the county is seeking land that buffers existing parks.
But officials say competition from private development often makes acquisitions difficult. Developers can work more quickly and oftentimes pay higher prices for land, which in this region, increases in value almost daily.
Some property owners, however, have chosen preservation over profit.
During the Ezell Park ribbon-cutting ceremony, Mint Hill Commissioner Trey Long said that the property once belonged to his family.
“They didn't want development on it. They wanted green space and something for the community,” he said.
Rodriguez-McDowell said the county has had similar land acquisitions, and “some people see the value of green space,” including county leaders, who view parkland as a way to preserve open space, protect the tree canopy and support environmental stewardship.
More than just playgrounds
As the region grows, demands on the park system get heavier. So does the wear-and-tear on existing facilities, some of which are decades-old.
Residents have been vocal about wanting certain amenities. Youth sports leagues say they need more fields, as The Ledger reported in 2024. Myers Park Trinity Little League, which serves nearly 1,000 baseball players, said it had waitlists because of limited field availability. Local swim teams also say there aren’t enough public pools to go around and are having to get creative for practices, like renting private neighborhood pools.
But to create and update the Meck Playbook, the parks system consistently surveys residents and asks the public what it wants. Park officials say the top answers are always greenways and upgrades on existing parks.
That’s also the purpose of the Park and Recreation Commission, which is a volunteer advisory board that serves as the liaison between the public and the park department. Representatives from different regions within the county hold community meetings regularly and report back to Park and Recreation every month. (They’re looking for more members.)
Kip Kiser, the chair of the Park and Recreation Commission, says that he hears that residents want sports fields the most.
“There needs to be more of a balance between new parks and greenways,” Kiser told The Ledger.
Over the past few years, the county has been focused on renovating older facilities, but this time, they’re spending a little extra on more durable materials that won’t need as frequent maintenance, like paved trails and artificial turf surfaces.
“In the long run, it’s saving us money,” Lynn said.
Last year, the county approved Park and Rec’s 2026-2030 CIP, which includes funding for multiple projects identified in the Meck Playbook, many of which are park “reinvestments,” or renovations.
But as those projects wrap up, Lynn said that park and greenway priorities will switch places in the next five years or so. The county will begin activating new parks instead of renovating old ones, and will start renovating the greenways instead of building new.
Why new parks take so long
Even after the county acquires land, a park may still be years away. In a perfect world, the process, from identifying and acquiring land to cutting the ribbon, would take four to five years, Lynn said. But, like most government entities, money, or the lack of it, remains the biggest obstacle.
“What we hear a lot is, ‘the houses have been here for a long time. Why isn’t there a park here?’ Well, in this particular part of the county, we haven’t had land to do it, and we haven’t had a lot of funding to be able to go and buy a lot of land,” Lynn said. “I don’t know that there is a way to break that cycle of buying the land and then quickly turning it around unless we’re able to find other funding sources,” like grants, for example.
Lynn said the park department has looked into grants, but most state grants are geared toward smaller counties and more rural areas, “so we’re a little bit limited in our ability to catch up.”
Ezell Park offers up a case study. The property, purchased in 2001, was included in a 2008 parks bond package approved by voters. But the 2008 recession stalled the park and many other planned projects.
“There was no money to build it, and so the project was shelved,” Lynn said.
Eventually, funding became available again, and the Meck Playbook moved Ezell Park up the priority list, especially because it was located in one of the 17 park deserts.
According to Lynn, once funding is secured, a typical park still requires years of community engagement, design, permitting, bidding and construction. The timelines can stretch even longer for large projects or if economic conditions change.
It’s the reality that explains why ribbon-cutting ceremonies on brand new parks remain relatively uncommon.
There’s also a community interest in more regional recreational centers. The county has two: Eastway Regional, which serves the eastside of Charlotte; and Northern Regional, which serves northern Mecklenburg towns. But today, those cost upward of $100M to build, said Kiser of the Park and Recreation Commission.
To meet the immediate recreational needs of the county, Kiser said the department should prioritize building smaller parks instead of large ones.
“They need to be able to get them done quicker … maybe within three years instead of eight or 10,” Kiser said.
What’s next
Mecklenburg County is working to avoid repeating the circumstances that created many of today’s park shortages, Lynn said.
Asked whether today’s park planning is more proactive or reactive, Lynn said the county is trying to become more proactive by identifying areas that lack park access and targeting land acquisitions before development eliminates the opportunity.
“The gap areas exist because we weren’t proactive 20 or 30 years ago,” he said.
In fact, he says the county has made some recent land purchases that have positioned Mecklenburg to eventually build more parks in several of the gap areas identified by the Meck Playbook, specifically in the Steele Creek area. The next challenge will be securing funding in the county budget to transform those acquisitions into functioning parks.
“We've made some really good headway,” Lynn said. “But now the next question is, when are we going to get the funding? When are we going to get to actually go and play pickleball on this property that you just bought a year ago?”
For that reason, park officials are staying realistic about the county’s future as they work to fill the gaps created in city planning decades ago while trying to keep up with the region’s growth.
“I think there’s still a lot of work to do.”
Lindsey Banks is assistant editor for The Charlotte Ledger: lindsey@cltledger.com