It’s been more than a year since Mayor Eric Johnson announced a plan to convert vacant lots across the city into parks — a plan that is now bearing fruit and that deserves applause for helping bring valuable green space to neglected parts of the city.

As our colleague Sharon Grigsby reported earlier this month, the first five spaces have been identified for transformation. They are in pockets of the city where there isn’t adequate access to the sort of community parks where families can take the kids to run around and play outside.

We have supported this plan with the caveat that the city must ensure that it can fund the ongoing maintenance of new parks without letting existing parks get less attention.

Park Board President Arun Agarwal has offered assurances that the city has a good plan in place that will see the parks kept in the condition that makes them assets and not liabilities to their neighborhoods.

Johnson deserves credit for laying out this vision, but there is plenty of credit to go around for those who are making it a reality. That includes Robert Kent and the Trust for Public Land where he is associate vice president and state director, as well as Johnson’s “greening czar” Garrett Boone. The Lyda Hill Foundation and the Meadows Foundation have have also generously contributed.

Johnson speaks often of the important role parks played in his childhood, and we praised his focus on getting back to basics in his recent state of the city speech. Parks should be viewed as a basic element of city work.

Dallas has benefited in immeasurable ways from the blooming of our parks system in recent years, especially from the opening of the downtown parks and the expansion of the trail system.

The downtown parks system is now mature, and while it has already paid dividends, we are really only at the beginning of understanding what the ongoing contribution will be.

The economic and quality of life boost that the trails have created for Dallas is massive, meanwhile. People all over the city depend on trails for exercise, socializing and mobility. It’s hard to imagine that just a few years ago, those weren’t available in many places. A great deal of work and investment remains to bring the trail system to full maturity, but we are confident the city is on the right path.

But Johnson rightly identified the sort of spaces between, the little neighborhood green spaces, as a place where we need to get better.

The difficulty is ensuring that we don’t build what we can’t maintain. These five parks are modest enough that we are confident they can be folded into the broader parks budget.

As this plan develops, deeper budgeting work will be necessary to ensure the whole parks system has a sustainable maintenance plan.

Great parks make great neighborhoods. Building them is one thing. Making certain they are excellent is just as important.

We welcome your thoughts in a letter to the editor. See the guidelines and submit your letter here. If you have problems with the form, you can submit via email at letters@dallasnews.com