Sunshine over river and trees

Planning & Public Input

The Washington State Parks invites you to play an active role in planning and developing your state parks.

With your help, state parks can be even better at providing superior recreational and learning opportunities for visitors, while protecting our state's natural areas and cultural assets. State parks need your talents, skills, and good ideas to become the premier destinations of uncommon quality that the commission envisions for state parks.

Planning projects at Washington state parks may include:

  • Comprehensive land-use plans
  • Facility plans
  • Miscellaneous planning projects
  • Park developments projects
  • Program plans

The primary planning project for the agency is to create land-use plans for all state parks. The land-use plans will guide the way your state parks are developed and used in the future. The planning process outlined below depends on park visitors and local communities to help guide the way. You are invited to participate.

The planning process

The planning process, also known as the classification and management planning (CAMP), includes four stages:

  1. Identify issues and concerns of park stakeholders
  2. Explore alternative approaches to address identified issues
  3. Prepare preliminary recommendations to address issues or suggest a realistic compromise
  4. Propose final recommendations for formal agency and commission adoption

Each park planning project will go through these four stages or some similar variation, depending on the particular park. People are encouraged to participate at every stage of a planning project. The process also reflects the standards set out in the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA) and information collected through the planning effort will be used to satisfy SEPA requirements.

Share your ideas & comments

Your comments are important to us. By sending email comments about a project, you will automatically be placed on the park email distribution list and receive notices of public workshops and updated planning information. If you don't want to receive email notices, please let us know and we'll take you off the list. If you would like to receive notices of workshops by mail, please provide your mailing address along with your comments.

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