By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor

While the Morgan Junction Park expansion site rolls toward its next step – hydroseeding, now that the contaminated soil has been replaced with new fill dirt – the community group fighting for a “skate dot” at or near the site has just talked face-to-face with city reps.

Morgan Junction All-Wheels Association, which rose from a community effort to unofficially “activate” the long-vacant site with skateboarding features a few years ago, has put volunteer time and grant money into what they originally were told could be built along with the rest of the expansion project at no extra cost.

(Grindline’s schematic for proposed ‘skate dot’ at Morgan Junction Park site)

Then Seattle Parks‘ project team changed and so did the message they gave to MJAWA – that the price tag for the “skate dot” (a relatively small skatable area within a park, not a full-fledged skatepark) was much higher than the estimate given by the skatepark experts at Grindline when creating a schematic design for MJAWA, and that the skate feature could not be covered by the project budget even though that is now estimated at $7.5 million, more than two-thirds of which has been spent.

Standing at the current Morgan Junction Park site in a drizzle late Monday afternoon, MJAWA reps, Seattle Parks reps, the president of the Morgan Community Association, and reps from two nonprofits who’ve been supporting MJAWA through the process, Skate Like a Girl and Seattle Parks Foundation, talked for about an hour and a half. MJAWA didn’t get exactly what one of its leaders, Matt Johnston, kept asking for – a cost estimate just for what they propose building, without throwing in the cost of other complications – but some progress was made.

The biggest complication, said new project manager Trae Yang, is stormwater drainage, made more complex by the slope of the site. If the skate dot goes in the existing Morgan Junction Park – the scenario with which MJAWA and the previous Parks team had been working – a pipe has to go 500 feet downslope to the west. If it goes on the expansion site, she said, chances are it could be connected to a pipe at street level. But using that site would require a different design, since the one on which MJAWA worked with Grindline incorporated some existing features at the current park (and MJAWA leaders reminded Parks that one of the concerns about the expansion site had been noise for adjacent residents, less of an issue if it were built on the park site further south).

All the new concerns are because of requirements imposed by stormwater regulations dating to 2016 which Yang pronounced “pretty brutal.” She added that “infiltration” drainage is not allowed because of the contaminated soil at the park expansion site – even though it’s been removed, the site isn’t totally clean. And even though Parks and SDOT have reportedly resolved the issue of ownership of the Eddy Street right-of-way that bisects the park-and-addition site, Yang said she still needs to find out whether any of that is contaminated. (The existing park site apparently got a clean bill of health sometime back, though it held a service station/vehicle-repair shop before its short-lived time as a potential Seattle Monorail station site.)

MJAWA leaders expressed their frustration that all this seems to be in danger of washing their two years of work with the previous city team – including $72,000 worth of design work funded in part by a city grant – down the drain, figuratively and literally. And not just their work – also the community’s buy-in and enthusiasm: “We told the entire community this is where it would be.”

So the bottom line for that aspect of the project, Yang explained, is that she has a lot of investigating to do to figure out the stormwater-drainage issue and how the park addition’s original design – even before MJAWA got involved – can factor into it: “We still don’t know a lot about the site.” (That despite the city having bought it more than a decade ago, and having demolished the commercial building it held just a few years after that.) She and other Parks representatives – including Kim Baldwin, Olivia Reed, and Annie Hindenlang – said that’s likely to take at least a few months, and committed to monthly updates on where that stands.

But they still wouldn’t give MJAWA what they were desperate for, a ballpark number for what skate-dot construction might cost, separate from the drainage issues and any other site complications. MJAWA wanted the city to acknowledge that resolving drainage difficulties was a Parks issue, not theirs. As Johnston put it, “It’s like Parks is putting some bricks in our backpacks when we’re just trying to ride our bikes.” Baldwin countered, “Parks will fund as much as we can but we just don’t know” the extent. Hindenlang said they needed to figure out the site constraints before they met again with the designers who’d been involved in the project, Board and Vellum.

MJAWA did get city reps to acknowledge that they’re the ones who changed the terms – the skate dot’s current state of limbo isn’t the community volunteers’ fault. But that’s not much solace when the future is to some degree clear as mud. Yang expressed some hope that things will turn out to be not as costly or problematic as she fears but stressed that she has a lot of work to do to get answers. And some of the issues she’s dealing with could come down to factors such as how tough their assigned reviewer at the Department of Construction and Inspections will be.

Skate Like A Girl’s Kristin Eberling said the most important constituency in the process was waiting for answers too: “I’d like to have something to tell the 13- to 17-year-olds I’ve been telling about this.”

WHAT’S NEXT? Among other things, there’ll be a project update of some kind when the Morgan Community Association has its quarterly meeting on October 15 (watch morganjunction.org for details). And MJAWA promises updates too.