Exploring California's 12,000 Parks With Open Data

California’s extensive state park system is a guarantee that all the state’s citizens, not just the moneyed elite, will have access in perpetuity to the state’s embarrassment of natural riches—mountains, beaches, deserts, forests, you name it.

In recent years, however, the system has been damaged by financial woes and scandals. First, budget shortfalls threatened to shut down 70 of the 278 parks in the system, and led to cutbacks in hours and services at others. Then, after nonprofits and private groups raised money to save individual parks, it turned out the parks system’s administrators had been sitting on more than $50 million in unspent funds—a scandal that led to the resignation of the state’s parks director and the creation of the Parks Forward Commission. That group, charged with figuring out how to stabilize and modernize the system and its administration, has just released its recommendations.