The city's parks department entered 2026 with $2 million less to spend than the year before, according to a report the Gazette covered in April. Britt Haley, the outgoing parks director, framed the year ahead with a simple line: the department would keep doing a lot with what it has, then do it with less. That is the citywide story. It is not the story of Monument Valley Park.
Walk the stone overlooks near the Geologic Column or the retaining walls along Shadow Lake and you will find work that finished years after the projects that funded it. The stonework holds. The bridges are sound. None of that came from the general fund line that just got trimmed. It came from neighbors.
The park that pays for itself
Friends of Monument Valley Park, a nonprofit formed in 2000, has spent the last several years working through a punch list of century-old repairs: the Tahama Spring retaining wall in October 2022, a WPA-era pedestrian bridge in June 2023, the tiered retaining wall east of Shadow Lake that same year. Its most recent completed project was the Duck Lake perimeter and embankment walls in 2025, funded through the group's annual Give! Campaign. The next target is the historic stonework in the southern half of the park, including the Bijou Street entryway.
None of this is city money in the way most residents assume "city park" means city money. It is donor money, raised a project at a time, often matched. The 2025 matching grant sponsors listed on the group's site include Bob McGrath Construction, Ent Credit Union, the Joseph Henry Edmondson Foundation, Groninger Construction, Lots A Liquor, Homeland Plumbing & Heating, Pathways Advisor Group, and the Old North End Neighborhood association itself. ONEN does not charge mandatory dues. It runs on volunteer hours and the same kind of contribution that funds the wall repairs a few blocks away. The neighborhood association and the park nonprofit are not separate systems that happen to share a zip code. One funds the other.
This matters more this year than most, because the alternative city parks are absorbing the $2 million cut without a Friends group standing behind them. Monument Valley Park has one. That is why the stonework keeps getting fixed while the department's own report describes an organization bracing for less.
A golf course that answers to its own fees
Patty Jewett runs on a similar principle, just with a different mechanism. The city lists the course under what it calls an enterprise designation, which in municipal terms means it is funded by the fees golfers pay to play it, not by the general fund that covers police, fire, and the rest of the parks system. When the city's overall parks budget tightens, Patty Jewett's finances do not automatically tighten with it, because its revenue comes from greens fees, not tax appropriation.
Those fees for 2026 run $24 for nine holes and $48 for eighteen, with a modest bump on weekends. That money paid for a real list of course work this year: tee extensions on several holes to account for how far modern players actually hit the ball, green contour refinements, reshaped bunkers with new sand, improved fairway drainage, and selective tree trimming to open up sightlines that had closed in over a century of growth.
The course earns that reinvestment. The city's own April report put Patty Jewett's annual rounds at roughly 119,000, nearly double the 62,000 logged at Valley Hi, the only other municipal course in the system. That gap is not a rounding error. It means Patty Jewett is not a sleepy neighborhood course that happens to have history. It is the busiest public course the city runs, carrying nearly twice the play of its counterpart, and its enterprise structure means that volume translates directly into course condition rather than getting absorbed into a citywide budget fight.
The nights and Saturdays that make this legible
None of this shows up as an abstraction if you live here. It shows up as a Monday night on the lawn west of the Fine Arts Center, where Friends of Monument Valley Park ran its free Musical Mondays series through July:
- July 6: Funkology, funk and dance
- July 13: Guitar Sam and His Band, classic rock
- July 20: WireWood Station, Americana
- July 27: Susan Rissman and Friends, R&B, pop and jazz
Bring a chair or a blanket, the group's own site suggests, and expect a picnic crowd rather than a ticketed one. The series just wrapped for the season, and the next visible sign of the same funding habit will likely be progress on the Bijou Street entryway, the item Friends of Monument Valley Park has named as its next priority in the park's southern half.
The same volunteer instinct shows up smaller and more often at Whistle Pig Brewing, the neighborhood taproom on Templeton Gap Road that calls itself a family gathering spot as much as a brewery. It pours 17 taps, runs free bingo on Tuesday nights, and brings in food trucks Friday and Saturday since the kitchen closed. A few blocks over, Good Neighbors Meeting House serves coffee and an all-day waffle menu alongside a small market of local goods, the kind of place where a Saturday errand turns into forty minutes at a table.
The park and the golf course do not look this cared for by accident. They look this way because two separate funding structures, one donor-driven and one fee-driven, both happen to route money back into the ground instead of into a general fund that is already stretched thin this year.
The potluck that closes the loop
Every fall, ONEN throws its own event on the same principle that funds the park: show up, contribute something, and the thing stays alive. ONEN Fest is a block party open to any resident, built around a potluck table, a chili cook-off, yard games, and neighbors who have not run into each other since the Fourth of July parade earlier in the summer. It is the social version of the matching grant. Nobody is required to bring a dish. Enough people do that the tradition holds.
That is the pattern worth sitting with if you already live inside these boundaries. The wide streets and the century-old trees get most of the attention when people describe this neighborhood, and they earn it. But the reason the infrastructure underneath all of that still functions this particular year, in a year when the city's own numbers show less money to go around, is that Old North End and Patty Jewett never fully outsourced their own upkeep to the city in the first place. The neighborhood association matches grants. The golf course runs on its own fees. The park nonprofit finishes what the budget cannot. It is not luck. It is a habit that predates this year's shortfall by a couple of decades, and it is still the reason the walk to Musical Mondays, the Saturday tee time, and the fall potluck all feel exactly as solid as they did last year.
If you are weighing what a home in this pocket of Colorado Springs is actually worth to you day to day, that durability is worth more than most listing photos can show. Eric Scott has spent years working this specific stretch of the city and is always glad to talk through what a particular block or a particular season looks like up close. Book a private consultation whenever you are ready for that conversation.
