This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

Pierce County Executive Pat McCarthy has a promising idea for Sprinker Recreation Center: Keep it open on the cheap, since there’s no money to keep it open on the expensive.

Pierce County Council Chairman Roger Bush also has a promising idea: Ask the voters to establish a park district with its own taxing authority, to save both Sprinker and the county’s other recreational properties.

Bush’s notion – creating a county equivalent of Tacoma’s Metro Parks – has been kicking around for a while. It’s one possible answer to a truly dire problem – the near-collapse of Pierce County’s parks system.

The recession has thrown county revenues into decline, forcing the council into one round of budget cuts after another. Just about everyone agrees on the need to preserve public safety and the justice system, whose share of the county budget has now risen to 78 percent.

The County Council has pared everything else ruthlessly, especially recreation. It has all but eliminated maintenance – watering and mowing grass, emptying trash, keeping restrooms open – at more than 20 parks. Another, the popular Spanaway Park, is now closed on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Pierce County’s public playgrounds are being strangled for lack of funding.

Sprinker, the faded gem of the system, embodies the general slide.

The ball fields, tennis courts and Olympic-sized skating rink of the Spanaway center account for half of the entire system’s recreational activity. But the building that houses the rink has been rusting and falling into decrepitude for many years.

Those long years of deferred maintenance carry a price tag of $28 million-plus – the unaffordable cost of properly restoring the structure. Another “solution” is closure. A recent engineering study suggested that the building’s roof might collapse in a winter storm. The rink looked headed for closure, perhaps permanently, on Oct. 31.

McCarthy got a second opinion, and this week another engineering firm tentatively opined that the roof still has some life in it and the building could be kept limping along for as little as $6 million.

The county could conceivably pay for that by bonding existing parks revenue.

If the numbers bear scrutiny, that would solve the immediate problem of keeping Sprinker open. Still, it’s only a stopgap for Sprinker, and it doesn’t do a thing for the rest of the park system.

Hence Bush’s proposal for shifting the responsibility from county government to a new Pierce County park district. The County Council could thus avoid presiding over the continued disintegration of the system – good politics, by the way – and the parks would become the first and sole priority of an independent government.

There’s no free lunch: A new parks district would require new taxes. But the voters would have to approve both the district and the taxes – more good politics, because the decision would be shifted to the citizens.

In an ideal world, county government would remain responsible for the county’s parks. But given the severity of the recession, the pathetic state of county finances and the lack of obvious alternatives, a new district might be the only chance to save the system.