3 more chances to have your say on city parks’ future

Tonight at Hiawatha Community Center (6 pm), and tomorrow at Camp Long (5 pm) and Alki Community Center (7 pm), it’s your last three chances to tell the city Parks Department what you want to see in its plan for the future — we attended the first West Seattle meeting last week @ Southwest Community Center (read our detailed report here); the format is definitely discussion-friendly – you get to share ideas in a small group, rather than before a big crowd. Community activist Charles Redmond went to both the Southwest meeting and the Saturday afternoon Delridge meeting and gave us permission to share his thoughts, which conclude with a recommendation for you:

I attended the Saturday meeting which Parks and Recreation held at the Delridge Community Center (across the street from Youngstown Cultural Arts Center). These meetings are to solicit Seattle resident opinions, criticisms, ideas and comments on the next five and ten years for the department and its many, many programs and assets. The process of updating the Seattle Parks and Recreation strategic business plan runs through June of 2008. This present portion of the process is their first round of outreach and consists of 32 community meetings (held at each and every community center in the city), a hand-out survey form, and an on-line survey form. The community feedback portion will have a second round of community meetings beginning in April, 2008, to review the comments and recommendations which this first round created. The final plan is to go before the Mayor and City Council in June, 2008, for review and adoption.

The Delridge meeting was my second Parks and Rec meeting on this topic. I had attended the meeting earlier in the week at the SW Community Center (and Athletic Center) on SW Thistle St. uphill from Sealth High School. The Delridge meeting was not as well attended. Initially there were three Parks and Rec staffers and four residents, three of us from the Gatewood or Gatewood Hill area, one from Highland Park. We were joined a little later by a Delridge resident, two Junction-area residents, and a resident from Magnolia. Part of the reason for the low turnout is probably the timing – the meeting began at 2:00 pm, by which time the snow was falling pretty heavily in West Seattle. When we left at 4:00 pm the streets were barely passable – including Delridge. Coming home I was following a Seattle police cruiser who had chains and they weren’t doing very well on the slick somewhat icy-slushy asphalt of Delridge Way with his rear-wheel-drive Crown Victoria cruiser. So, hopefully, the weather was the real cause of the low turnout.

The few of us who where there, though, didn’t take the weather as any reason to be short or sparing in either our criticism of Parks and Rec nor with our praise and recommendations. The Delridge group focused on some areas which the Southwest Community group focused on and others which were very different. One recurring theme included multiple uses for the playing fields. One great recommendation was to re-stripe some of the fields so that they could be used for both soccer, rugby, lacrosse, and ultimate frisbee. This could easily be done using a slighly larger-than-normal field and making the chalk lines in different colors. This has been effectively done in the playfield areas of other cities. This allows more than one league and more than one scratch game to make use of the same play field.

Another issue with playfields which was also a recurring theme (from SW, and, as indicated by some of the Delridge meeting attendees, from some of the other meetings as well) was the use of presently open space to add more play fields. The issue seems to be involve a split-down-the-middle proportion of city residents – about half the residents seem to want their existing open space to remain open with examples being Discovery Park and Magnussen Park. The other half seems to want portions of the existing open space to be applied to the creation of more playfields. The problem seems to be complex in that some who want more play fields also want the evening light standards installed while others are okay to just have the additional play field space. The issue of skate parks came up with most of the attendees in favor of beginning work on skate facilities here in West Seattle, leaving the contentious issue of “where” alone.

This brought up the real reason why the resident from Magnolia had come all the way to Delridge to participate. That gentleman indicated that at the Magnolia Community Center meeting, 11 of the 15 residents who attended did not live in Magnolia and were at the Magnolia meeting to push the notion of turning Discovery Park into a complex of additional play fields. The Magnolia gentleman said there were groups (he didn’t identify them as he didn’t want to create additional acrimony) representing single-points-of-view which were going around to all the Parks meetings to stock the crowd with their position and create the sense that whole communities were behind this idea.

I’m pleased to report that both the Southwest Community Center and Delridge Community Center meetings I attended did not seem to be stocked with residents from outside the general West Seattle area. I’m also pleased that the gentleman from Magnolia felt the Delridge meeting was a valid process. He did say, by the way, that he grew up on Alki and went to local West Seattle schools prior to college and moving to Magnolia. We decided he was a “local” based on his incredible early recollections of some of the parks issues here in West Seattle going back to the ’40s and ’50s. Parks and Rec staff did say they were aware of this “gaming” of the system and that their process included methods of ensuring that residents adjacent to important park assets were not being over-run by other voices. That brought up another issue, though, and that is the concept that certain parks are “neighborhood” parks because the neighborhood grew up around and concurrent with the development of the park. Are these parks to be treated differently than signature parks such as Discovery, Seward, Lincoln, Carkeek? Or, are all parks really the province of all residents and issues of “locality” not valid issues. This caused the Park and Rec staff to begin an interesting discussion of some past brouhaha’s such as the new playfield in the Loyal Heights neighborhood. Parks and Rec was requested to take a closer look at both their mission statement and their community process with the expectation that this issue will come up again in the April review.

The Delridge meeting also brought up a new notion of having the Parks and Recreation department look at ways of partnering with other organizations and private entities to both enhance their programs and reduce perceived “competition” for services. An example of this cited by some of the residents present was the use of health and physical fitness gear in some of the community center facilities. The YMCA and certain large church organizations also have these facilities, as do many, many private health clubs. The health clubs can offer more services at lower cost but can’t offer the focused set of services which Parks and Rec does to specific Seattle resident groups such as youth or many with disabilities. If Parks and Rec were to find appropriate partners, some of the city facilities might be focused on more specific programs leaving the Y and private or religious groups to focus on more general programs. The ideas will be explored more by the Parks and Rec folks, according to the staff there.

Another issue which came up for the first time (to me, anyway) at the Delridge meeting was the constant threat of invasive species eating into the green preserves that Parks and Rec manages such as the West Duwamish Greenbelt and other greenbelts like the East Queen Anne and Beacon Hill areas. That’s a big issue because clearing invasive species is a constant task and restoring the native species is a time-consuming task. More volunteers and better greenspace management techniques were suggested as possible solutions.

One of the biggest concerns, expressed at both meetings I attended, is the funding issue. Several suggestions were made at both the Southwest and Delridge meetings which included creating some kind of resident subscription program similar to those of the Woodland Park Zoo or the Aquarium and using commercial sponsors for such things as play field score signs and lights. No one wanted a complete corporate makeover, though, and we all objected to the concept of “named” parks becoming sponsored so something like the Amazon-Lincoln Park will probably never come to pass.

The process is very involving with Parks and Rec folks making sure each and every resident who attends has his or her chance to respond to the five basic questions they’re asking. Parks and Rec staff said the results of the individual community center meetings would be posted to their website beginning soon – though they did not have a specific date when we could access them. The Parks and Rec folks serve as the record-keepers during these meetings and then reviewed their notes at the end of the meeting to make sure that the resident comments were correctly captured. They also said that folks who could not attend the in-person meetings would have the same voice in producing the final recommendations if they either mailed in their comments, dropped them off at any community center (there should be a drop box for Parks and Rec Strategic Business Plan comments at each community center main desk) or using their online survey form. The form is
here and takes about 5 minutes to complete.

The Parks and Rec staff at both the Delridge and the Southwest Community Center meetings also made a plea for residents to consider joining the advisory boards which Parks and Rec have established for each of the community centers and each of the four environmental learning centers (ours being Camp Long).

I’d recommend every reader of WSB consider attending one of these meetings. I met two folks who each live within five blocks of me who I hadn’t known prior and it made the whole concept of community building seem much more valid. Parks and Rec is under new management with their new superintendent and so far I’m very much liking their new community-oriented and interactive approach.

Again, tonight’s chance for you to be part of this process is at Hiawatha Community Center in the Admiral District, 6-8 pm; tomorrow, you can go to Camp Long 5-7 pm and/or Alki Community Center 7-9 pm.

1 Reply to "3 more chances to have your say on city parks' future"

  • dave December 4, 2007 (11:22 am)

    Chas –

    It was great to meet you and have the opportunity to share ideas on the future of Parks. I hope WSB readers heed your call to take the time to either attend one of these meetings, complete the online survey, and/or emailing/calling Parks with their ideas.

    I also want to give you kudos for your summary of the meetings. I only hope that the folks from Parks heard my pitch for playfield designs that account for the variety of user groups who utilize (or more accurately “want to utilize”) those resources with that level of understanding.

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