Times Observer photo by Josh Cotton Nathan Reigner, the state’s first director of outdoor recreation, speaks to county and regional stakeholders during an event held at the Conewango Club Tuesday morning.

Nathan Reigner was named the state’s first director of outdoor recreation early last year.

He was in Warren on Tuesday meeting with recreation stakeholders to help narrow down just what his focus should be.

It’s part of a series of meetings that are part of the state’s Growing Outdoor Recreation in Pennsylvania initiative.

In many ways, it was further discussion about issues that have been debated in the community for years amid a growing consensus that outdoor recreation is a key piece of our region’s future.

“It takes a combination of business and industry, government and non-government… to make this work,” Reigner stressed. “That is why we are in the room together.”

Underpinning the entire effort is the knowledge that “a hike isn’t about one foot in front of the other,” he stressed. “Camping certainly isn’t about sleeping on the hard ground.”

The reason?

“The benefits they deliver in our lives.”

So the question then, really, is how to not only enhance those benefits but also change thinking that outdoor recreation as an industry is a valuable sector of our state’s economy. Reigner noted that the industry is 1.6 percent of the state’s GDP with a $14 billion annual economic impact. That percentage is greater than the oil and gas industry and agriculture.

“Pennsylvania is a heavy weight and we need to start playing like the heavyweight that we are in outdoor recreation,” he said.

Reigner’s argument in part is that outdoor recreation industry expansion is a key piece of growing more traditional sectors.

“We know that the pathway toward economic development runs directly through being able to recruit and retrain highly competitive and highly mobile” workers and entrepreneurs.

This string of meetings occurring across the state has revealed some interesting symmetry in this space where symmetry often isn’t the case. There’s a recognition that the future of recreation sites in our area will be answered by the community, not government.

“That is the exact same thing we heard in Philadelphia last Wednesday,” Reigner said. “Members of the Philadelphia community said it is only going to work for us here if it’s done up from within and reflects our interests and you need to frame the outdoors with respect to our lives…. While we have very different places in communities, I’m taking heart from the fact that in these two corners the message is the same – that the communities will come together and when empowered be able to define the best use of our resources for the coming generation.”

He also argued why the time is right, explaining that exploding outdoor recreation amenity use was seen prior to the pandemic.

“We are riding a long-term trend that is going to continue in the decades to come (with) booming outdoor recreation,” he said. “Pa is a highly diverse state. These different places in the Commonwealth need different pathways toward economic development in the future” as well as a “coordinated, state-wide approach.”

Reigner’s office is new – the feedback received in these meetings will culminate in June with a series of recommendations to Gov. Josh Shapiro and is “vital for us as we get our Office of Outdoor Recreation up and off the ground.”

Reigner outlined “three strategic, priority areas that we think this office needs to work on.”

The first focuses on developing a recognized outdoor industry and development of that work force.

“Outdoor jobs are often low-wage,” he said. “We don’t see the public value of those benefits (of recreation) reflected in how we treat our outdoor workers.”

The second area focuses on community and economic development through the outdoors while the third aims to “build capacity for inclusive and equitable wellbeing through the outdoors.

The work is both in the short-term but, importantly, the long-term. Reigner noted there are typically “very few opportunities” to affect generational change.

“We cannot lose sight of the fact that this is a deeply human endeavor we are engaged in,” he said.