By Tim Bargainer, Senior Vice President at RVi Planning + Landscape Architecture

In 1998 I was sitting with a man who had been the mayor of Round Rock for the better part of a decade and he was still giving the city his time on the transportation board. We were talking about the future of the community, the way people who genuinely care about a place do, and somewhere in the middle of it I brought up the Brushy Creek corridor. I said I thought the corridor could one day be one of the finest park and trail assets the community would ever own. 

I believed that completely. I was also, I should admit, the youngest and probably the most idealistic person at the table. 

He heard me out. He wasn’t a dismissive man, and this was not a dismissive answer. He told me, more or less, what a lot of people who had actually run a city would have told me then. Parks were good and worthy things. But the town had bigger needs first. It needed water. It needed roads. It needed to keep up with growth that was already coming whether anyone was ready or not. A linear park along the creek was a lovely idea. It just wasn’t essential. 

At the time, I didn’t have an answer to that, at least not one that could move him. I believed the creek was worth more than that. I just couldn’t show him why. Not in the terms that decision would have been made in, anyway. 

For over twenty-five years I’ve thought about that conversation from time to time and I’ve come to believe it was never really about a park along a creek. It was about a single word. Essential. 

Every community has to decide what it can’t do without. That decision comes first, before any budget, and everything else lines up behind it. When he said parks were a quality-of-life item, he wasn’t telling me they had no value, he was telling me where they fell in the order of things. Essential on one side. Everything else on the other. And that idea, however much I loved it, was on the other side. 

He wasn’t wrong to see it that way. He was describing the world as nearly everyone understood it then. Water and roads were infrastructure. Parks were what you got to once the essentials were covered. That was the real limit in the room that day, and it wasn’t his imagination or mine. It was the language itself. 

A way to say it out loud  

One of the first things that really started to change my mind was a study. 

An economist named Ray Perryman put numbers to what a lot of us had felt for years and couldn’t prove. He looked at parks and open space and measured what they did to the things a city council actually votes on. Property values. Local spending. The tax base. When the report came out, I remember the feeling more than any single figure. It wasn’t that parks suddenly mattered. We already knew they mattered. It was that, for the first time, the value we’d been sensing had a language a budget could hear. 

That’s a smaller thing than a revelation and a larger thing than a statistic. It didn’t change the parks. It changed the conversation. A park could now be argued for in the same terms as a road, in the same room, in front of the same people. Research didn’t create the value of parks. It simply helped us recognize value that had always been there.

Then came a flood 

The next thing that really started to change my mind didn’t come from a study. It came from a flood. 

I was working on a park that sat low in the floodplain like so many do. Memorial Park, on Brushy Creek. It wasn’t the kind of place you typically build on. It flooded. In the old way of thinking, that was its weakness. The reason it was a park and not something more valuable was that it wouldn’t have been good for much else. 

Then a major storm blew through, the kind that used to be fairly rare but just really isn’t anymore. I went to look at it afterward. The park was submerged in water. The trails, the fields, all of it, disappeared beneath a slow brown sheet moving through where the ballgames used to be. 

And the Flats, the old neighborhood downstream in downtown Round Rock, was still dry. 

I don’t remember how long I stood there, but I remember exactly what changed. I began to truly understand something I had known on paper for years and had never really felt. The park wasn’t leftover land that happened to flood. The park was doing a job. It was holding the storm so the Flats didn’t have to. Every acre of it under water was an acre of somebody’s living room that stayed dry. The thing we’d thought of as “useless land” was the entire point. 

No one had funded that park to protect those homes. We’d built it for ballfields and trails, and it had been quietly doing something far larger the whole time, without being asked and without being thanked. I had spent years making the case for parks on the basis of what people could do in them. Standing at the edge of that water, I started to understand them by what they do for us whether we ask them to or not. 

Seeing the whole picture 

After that, I noticed I started asking different questions. 

I stopped asking only what was in a park and started asking what it was part of. A stand of old trees stopped being landscaping and became shade over a Texas summer that gets longer every year, which is another way of saying it became public health. A trail stopped being a place to jog and became a way for a kid to get to school without crossing four lanes of traffic. None of this was new. The trees had always thrown shade. The path had always gone from one place to another. What changed was that I finally saw them as part of how a community works, instead of nice things set on top of it. 

Looking back, I couldn’t tell you the day my perspective actually changed. It happened gradually, almost without me noticing. 

Early on I thought in terms of projects. A park here. A trail there. Each one its own thing, argued on its own terms, defended in its own line of the budget. Over time I stopped seeing them that way. A park isn’t one thing doing one job. It’s a piece of ground doing a dozen jobs at once, most of which nobody is counting. It cools the air and holds the water and moves the children and lifts the houses around it and gives a place its name, all at the same time. 

When I say we learned to value these places differently, I don’t mean the parks became more important. I mean our understanding became larger. Recreation was still there. We simply began to recognize that these same places could strengthen our economy, protect our neighborhoods, improve our health, restore habitat, and quietly hold communities together in ways we hadn’t fully appreciated. 

Seeing it differently 

If I could sit with that man again, I don’t think I’d tell him he was wrong. I don’t think he was. 

He asked the right question. What can a growing town afford, and what actually counts as essential? That question never goes away. Every community has to answer it, in every generation, with whatever understanding it happens to have at the time. What’s changed since 1998 isn’t the question. It’s the size of the answer. We know more now, because floods and heat and studies and over twenty-five years of paying attention have taught us more. An idea that couldn’t cross the line into essential back then can cross it easily today, and nobody at the table would blink. 

The Brushy Creek Regional Trail came a couple of years after that conversation, and today it’s still evolving. I don’t say that as a victory. I say it because it’s true, and because it makes the point better than any argument I could build. Nothing about the creek changed. We did. 

Which leaves me with a harder thought, if the worth of that creek was real long before we had the words to defend it, then there is almost certainly something we undervalue right now for the very same reason. Something already doing quiet work for our communities that we haven’t yet learned to measure, or even to name. I don’t know what it is. That’s the point. He couldn’t see the full worth of the creek, and I’m not at all sure I can see whatever the creek is now. 

A hopeful lesson

So I try to hold my certainty a little more loosely than I once did. 

The parks never changed. The creek corridor was worth exactly what it was worth on the afternoon I first brought it up. What changed was us. We learned, slowly and usually the hard way, to recognize what these places had been giving us all along. When I sit with that, it strikes me as a hopeful thing. It means a community is capable of understanding more than it once did. It means the next generation will inherit a wider idea of value than we did and will hand down a wider one still. 

Nothing changed. We did. 

Tim Bargainer has spent over thirty years working with communities as a planner and landscape architect. These essays are his attempt to think out loud about how we come to understand the value of the places we share.  You can find more of Tim’s essays here Tim Bargainer | Substack