Measure description
The Controller’s Office and the Recreation and Parks Department (RPD) evaluate City parks every year. Parks are evaluated using maintenance standards for several categories including lawns, children's play areas, restrooms, outdoor courts, or athletic fields. A park’s maintenance score is the percent of the applicable standards that are met. A perfect score of 100% would mean the park passed all applicable maintenance standards.
Why this measure is important
These standards measure the City's ability to provide parks that are clean, safe, and ready for use. The City’s parks provide places for recreation, activity and engagement, for peace and enjoyment, and for freedom and relief from the built world.
The chart’s legend is below:
- Y-axis: Citywide Average Park Score (percent)
- X-axis: Fiscal year
Recreation and Parks Department
The Controller’s Office and the Recreation and Parks Department (RPD) evaluate City parks every year. Parks are evaluated using maintenance standards for several categories of park features, like lawns, children's play areas, restrooms, outdoor courts, or athletic fields. Each feature has specific standards to meet on cleanliness, working equipment, landscaping, and other measures of maintenance and appearance.
These standards measure the City's ability to provide parks that are clean, safe, and ready for use. The standards do not evaluate the design of facilities or demand for amenities. These evaluations are not substitutes for professional assessment of structural integrity.
The evaluations produce scores for every City park. These scores are summarized in the dashboard below, which shows citywide trends, the highest and lowest scoring parks, changes in individual park scores over time, and park scores by supervisor district.
You can find more details, data, and dashboards on the progam's website.
Chart description
This chart shows the average Citywide park score by fiscal year. The Y-axis shows the average park score. The X-axis shows the fiscal year. The unit of measure for this measure is a percentage score between 0% to 100%.
RPD has an annual target of the average Citywide park score at or above 90%. Any score above 90% is a good trend for San Francisco.
How performance is measured
All supervisory and management staff at RPD and all staff in the City Performance Unit of the Controller’s Office perform park evaluations each quarter. On average, each park is evaluated four times a year. RPD distributes quarterly reports of park maintenance scores for internal evaluation purposes. These reports are reviewed at Executive Staff and Parks & Open Spaces manager meetings. The Controller's Office reports summarizes data and results for public use once a year.
San Francisco adopted its original park maintenance standards in FY2006. They were updated with new criteria beginning in FY2015. The revised standards build on the previous standards to provide greater clarity, reduce evaluator interpretation guesswork, and allow for deeper analyses of the results. The new standards were the results of two years of concerted interdepartmental effort, involving review and feedback by front-line custodial and gardener staff, as well as manager and administrator input. In FY2017, the standards were consolidated and streamlined to make them more consistent and objective. You can find the latest park maintenance standards here.
Additional information
- Explore more in-depth data about all the parks on the new online Park Maintenance dashboard!
- Find a park on the Recreation and Parks Department website.
- Please visit DataSF for the scorecard data or to browse park evaluation data.
Data notes and sources
Primary data source: Scorecards Dataset on DataSF.
Please note this data is published on an annual fiscal year basis, typically around the Fall of each year (e.g. FY24 data will be available in October 2024).
City performance scorecards
This page is part of the City Performance Scorecards.
Return to the Transportation Scorecard.
Return to the City Performance Scorecards Home Page.