Tualatin Hills Park & Recreation District
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| Agency overview | |
|---|---|
| Formed | 1955 |
| Jurisdiction | Oregon |
| Headquarters |
Beaverton, Oregon 45°31′7″N 122°50′16″W / 45.51861°N 122.83778°WCoordinates: 45°31′7″N 122°50′16″W / 45.51861°N 122.83778°W |
| Employees | 212 |
| Annual budget | $40 million |
| Agency executive |
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| Website | www.thprd.org |
Tualatin Hills Park & Recreation District (THPRD) is a special parks district located in the eastern part of Washington County in the U.S. state of Oregon. Created in 1955, the district covers all of the city of Beaverton and many of those communities surrounding Beaverton in the Portland metropolitan area. The district covers an area of 50 square miles (130 km2) and serves a population of about 220,000, making it the largest parks district in Oregon. Tualatin Hills operates over 200 facilities totaling 2,100 acres (850 ha), including eight swimming centers. The district has an annual budget of $40 million and is overseen by a five-person board of directors.
Around 1953 some members of Parent-Teacher Associations (PTA) in Beaverton-area schools started campaigning to create a recreation district, as Beaverton had few parks at the time. This group organized a meeting of PTAs and other civic groups and then decided to create a formal group, the Tualatin Hills Park and Recreation Council. They drew up a constitution for the group, elected Elsie Stuhr as the president, and started holding board meetings in July 1953. At the first meeting they adopted the name for the proposed district.
This group then started collecting signatures on a petition in September 1953 in order to create a special parks district, and collected the planned 4,000 signatures by December 1953. They gathered additional signatures in order to compensate for any errors. A total of 4,400 signatures were collected and turned over in February 1954 to the county, which the county had required 27% of property owners to sign the petition.
Then beginning in June 1954 the then county court, now board of commissioners, held meetings to work out what the boundaries would be for the proposed district. School districts in the area that withdrew fully or in part from the proposal included Aloha, McKinley, Groner, Sunset Valley, McKay, Bethany, and Cooper Mountain. The district would be entirely within the boundaries of the then Beaverton Union High School District, which later through consolidation became the Beaverton School District.
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