CONTRACT AWARDED FOR MYRTLE RESERVOIR PARK: Construction is finally about to start on Myrtle Reservoir Park, now that the contract’s been awarded to Seattle-based Ohno Construction. Project manager Virginia Hassinger tells WSB the contract is for $470,000 pre-tax. A pre-construction meeting is set for June 7th, and after that, she says, they “will get going as soon as possible once the contract is fully executed.” (The official Parks webpage shows the park design.) Hassinger says Ohno is well-regarded for work done on Magnuson Park‘s sports fields and wetlands.

JUNCTION PLAZA PARK PLANTING PARTY DATE CHANGE: Friends of Junction Plaza Park has pushed the community planting party back a week to June 12th, since the current rainy weather put a bit of a crimp in the concrete pour at the construction site (42nd/Alaska). Those who’ve volunteered for the planting party should be getting an e-mail update from organizers. The park dedication is still on for June 29th.

Sometime in the next week, Seattle Parks (and other departments) will announce what midyear cuts they have to make this summer as the result of mayoral mandates on the budget – but there were no hints during briefings at last night’s Parks Board meeting downtown. In fact, while previous Parks statements had indicated the cuts would be announced on or around June 1st, acting deputy superintendent Eric Friedl told the board the news might not come till the following week. In his meeting-opening briefing, filling in for acting superintendent Christopher Williams, Friedl promised that even though this is a “furlough weekend” for Parks, and there’s no trash pickup today, the “seasonal schedule” mentioned after the trash debacle a few weeks ago kicks in Saturday, so you should NOT see a repeat at Alki – or any other city park – this weekend. Read on for other toplines from the Parks Board meeting, which started with a relatively sizable crowd – about 30 people:Read More

Seattle Parks just sent word that they’ve set the date for installation of the new rubberized track at recently renovated Hiawatha Playfield: Scheduled start date is July 5th, weather permitting, and that means a three-week shutdown for the entire field. Read on for the full announcement from Parks:Read More

The Parks and Green Spaces Levy Oversight Committee – citizen volunteers from around the city, including two from West Seattle – met tonight, and they’re getting closer to decisions on which citizen-proposed projects will receive money from the levy’s Opportunity Fund. Pigeon Point’s Pete Spalding is one of West Seattle’s reps, and tells WSB that the “initial staff ratings” on the proposed projects will be posted online tomorrow. In the meantime, he shares the news of the top 5 (again, in those initial staff ratings) projects in the southwest section of the city:

1. Puget Ridge Edible Park – West Seattle
2. South Park View Park – South Park
3. Morgan Urban Village Land Acquisition – Morgan Junction
4. Mini-Mart City Park – Georgetown
5. Highland Park Spray Park – Highland Park

We’ve reported on a few of those before – here’s our January story about the Highland Park proposal (the city plans a spray park in the spot now occupied by the HP wading pool, but admitted it’s underfunded, so community member Carolyn Stauffer spearheaded a proposal to enhance it with the Opportunity Fund); Puget Ridge Edible Park also appeared on the “Ideas for Seattle” website. In Morgan Junction, acquisition proposals have been described at recent Morgan Community Association meetings. Spalding also says two public meetings will be scheduled for June 14 and 28 – times and locations TBA – for those proposing Opportunity Fund projects to show them in an open-house format and to speak briefly to the Oversight Committee. The rest of the timeline’s spelled out here.

This Saturday, outdoor Colman Pool at Lincoln Park is scheduled to open for the first of three “pre-season weekends” – with its full season scheduled to start June 19th. The operative word here is “scheduled.” There’s no question it will be open this weekend (Saturday, Sunday, and Monday – Memorial Day). After that – same limbo as other programs, awaiting word of what midyear budget cuts Seattle Parks (and other city departments) will have to make, and what will and won’t be affected. As noted here last week, that also means that the question of whether city wading pools will or won’t open is also up in the air – even though a schedule has been published, the city website pointedly notes that the pools’ fate is pending Parks’ midyear-cut announcement on June 1st (one week from tomorrow). So in the meantime, if you love to swim, be sure to visit Colman during the three-day weekend – the special “preseason” schedule is on this webpage.

Will the trickle of rainwater we photographed in the Hiawatha Community Center< wading pool this morning be the only water it (and West Seattle’s other wading pools) sees this summer? At least a few citywide mailing lists are circulating concerns about the fate of Seattle Parks wading pools this summer, and some concerns/questions have made their way to the WSB inbox, so we wanted to share what we know: As reported in our coverage last week of the Seattle Parks Board meeting and a briefing by the department’s finance director, the status of wading pools (and other Parks facilities) will NOT be known until midyear budget cuts are made public. That announcement is still set for June 1st, according to Parks spokesperson Dewey Potter, with whom we checked again today; she said, “We are waiting for decisions from the Mayor and budget office on the array of possible reductions that might take place in mid-2010. We do not know if those decisions will include any closures in 2010; we will not know anything until they announce their decisions around June 1.” If the wading pools do open, Potter told us previously, opening day will be June 26.

By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor

Minutes before Seattle Parks‘ finance director told the Parks Board the midyear budget cut would be almost twice as big as she’d estimated, her former boss got up and shared his budget-crisis thoughts.

It’s not every day a high-ranking city official quits, and then returns to his ex-department shortly thereafter to offer advice as a private citizen.

But that’s exactly what ex-Parks Superintendent Tim Gallagher did last night, criticizing “elected officials” who “haven’t stepped forward to solve the problems we have today.”

So, he suggested, the Parks Board needs to step up and make sure its “advisory” role goes beyond his old job.

Read More

First heard out about this in the WSB Forums – new sand added to Alki Beach by the Parks Department caused problems for beach users, particularly volleyball players. Parks’ Joelle Hammerstad tells WSB they did indeed get many complaints because the sand was “too rough,” so they will “screen” the sand – and will replace if that turns out to be necessary. Read the entire thread in the Forums here.

As noted in our Sunday report on overflowing trash cans at Alki (David Hutchinson photo at left), it happened between Parks Department furlough days – and as discussed since, it didn’t just happen at Alki. With the furlough days now past for this month, we checked with Parks today to see if they had an official response – Joelle Hammerstad e-mailed back that it was “the result of a perfect storm” but that it has resulted in a change of plans for the future:

Overflowing trashcans at Alki Beach this weekend were the result of a perfect storm of three different events: 1) furloughs; 2) peak-season employees not having started yet; and 3) great weather. In fact, overflowing trashcans were a problem all over the city.

As has been mentioned in many a press release, all Parks employees will take 10 days of unpaid leave this year. We have intentionally skipped July and August as those are our busiest months. These furloughs save Seattle Parks and Recreation almost $2.1 million a year, and save jobs. None of us wants to take furlough days, but when we do, there are inevitable impacts.

Between late September and early May, Seattle Parks and Recreation has a skeleton crew working on the weekends. We begin what we call our “seasonal” shifts in mid-May. This year, those shifts actually begin this week, and continue until Sept. 28. This gives us maintenance coverage at Alki Beach from 6 a.m. to sunset 7 days a week, and until 11 p.m. Thursday through Saturday nights for beach fires. Our off-peak coverage is just two employees on both Saturday and Sunday to cover all the maintenance needs of West Seattle parks. Most of the time, that amount of coverage works just fine. Obviously, this past weekend, it didn’t.

And, of course, the weather was beautiful. As the weather desks at the tv stations reported, it had been more than 2 months since we’d had what can technically be termed as a “mostly sunny” day. People were itching to get outside and enjoy their parks, which is great. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the maintenance staff to support that level of park use.

There are 4 in-ground cans around the bathhouse part of Alki and 4 more down at Don Armeni. These go deep into the ground, 16 feet. The in-ground cans at the bathhouse (west area) have actually been in place for quite a while (at least 5 years). We recently installed new ones in the Don Armeni area, and I think those are the ones folks feel have difficult doors. They cans are brand new; we believe that the doors will loosen up and become more flexible as they are broken in.

This past weekend, we had 88 trash cans along the Alki strip, not including the ones at Seacrest and Don Armeni. We have Dumpsters at the bathhouse – 1 regular and 1 for recycling, and usually have another at the picnic shelter.

We take full responsibility for our part of the state of the parks this weekend. Plans are in place to ensure that another situation like the one this past weekend does not repeat itself. As soon as our crews came in on Monday morning, attending to overflowing trash cans was priority #1.

However, as many posters noted, we need the community’s help to ensure that our parks are clean, safe and habitable for everyone. Packing it out when you see that a trash can is full is a great idea. Bringing along a trash bag, and picking up trash as you see it, is another great one.

P.S. Our friends at Capitol Hill Seattle got a version of the same response.

Thanks to everyone for sending all kinds of event announcements to WSB so we can share them via the WSB Events calendar. This one is a unique jaunt through a local gem, with limited space, so we’re sharing it immediately:

May 9th. 9 to 12, Lincoln Park field trip. Learn more about the diversity of native plants in the forests of our park and about community efforts to protect and maintain that diversity. Stewart Wechsler is an experienced and knowledgable naturalist and field trip leader, who has done an extensive inventory of the natives in Lincoln. Sharon Baker is the volunteer forest steward and organizes and leads restoration work parties in the park through the Green Seattle Partnership. We will walk (slowly) up to 4 miles on good trails with some elevation gain. Sponsored by the Washington Native Plant Society. Call Sharon at 206 935 1769 or e-mail sbaker@uw.edu to sign up and get details. Limited to 15 participants.

We did not get to Beacon Hill last night for the first City Council/Mayor public hearing on the city budget, but monitored more than an hour and a half of testimony via a live stream (which ended before the hearing did). Most of it focused on citizens’ pleas to spare Seattle Parks facilities and programs from the deep cuts that have been rumored, and warned of, as city departments face “midyear” cuts shortly, as well as the plan for next year’s budget. One of the most impassioned voices was that of Alki’s Jackie Ramels – prefacing her remarks by noting she was speaking as a private citizen and not in her role as chair of the Seattle Parks Board – all but telling the council and mayor they had no right to even think about slashing parks, given how much public support they have: “How can you even think about closing parks and community centers, when the public has approved parks levies time and time again? The public gives and gives and gives, and the electeds take and take and take. … Fund parks, fully, now.” The image above, by the way, is our screen grab from the aforementioned live feed; Ramels tells WSB she got the EPIC FAIL T-shirt specifically for the occasion. (She also provided the crowd shot we used above.) Liesa Rose from Alki Community Center‘s Advisory Council spoke of the value of Parks programs such as after-school care, saying she could not work if there wasn’t someplace safe, affordable and convenient – the community center is adjacent to Alki Elementary – for her child to go. West Seattle’s Bruce Bentley (screen-grab image at right), on the board of the Associated Recreation Council that runs many programs at Parks facilities, said its revenue is $11 million, more than it’s ever been, because of the value citizens find: “We touch so many different lives across this process.” If you could not be at this hearing, another one is set for May 5 in North Seattle – details on the City Council’s page – where you’ll find council contact info (mayor contact info here) – even more budget info on the Budget Committee‘s page. Side note: We haven’t seen a comprehensive article about last night’s hearing from any regional-news sites yet, but will add a link if/when we do.

One other Parks note, in case you hadn’t already heard: Deputy Superintendent Christopher Williams was named Acting Superintendent on Wednesday, two days after Superintendent Tim Gallagher announced he’s resigning. Delridge Neighborhood Services Coordinator Ron Angeles, when forwarding this announcement to his mailing list, pointed out that Williams is a graduate of Chief Sealth High School (as noted in the last line of the official city news release about the appointment).

According to a memo shared with us by a reliable source, Seattle Parks Superintendent Tim Gallagher has just turned in his letter of resignation. By all accounts, the department is facing a budget crisis – as we reported here a month ago – and may be hit the hardest of any department, according to what City Council President Richard Conlin told the Southwest District Council in West Seattle earlier this month. Read ahead for the memo that includes Gallagher’s resignation letter (ADDED TUESDAY MORNING, reaction from West Seattle-residing Parks Board chair Jackie Ramels):Read More

10:18 AM: We’re at Southwest Community Center, where more than 100 people are at the third public meeting for the West Seattle (Westcrest) Reservoir Park project. First big announcement: An artist has been chosen for the art project that will be at the new park site – David Boyer, from Reno. He makes kinetic sculptures that move in the wind, according to Parks reps (there’s more info about his work at his website). Project manager Susanne Friedman also sought at the start of the meeting to dismiss rumors that the project would take away part or all of the Westcrest Off-Leash Area. She also said the city arborist has turned thumbs down on a disc-golf course in the park’s forested area, though that doesn’t rule out disc golf elsewhere on the site. Now they’re about to unveil the current design concept alternatives, which will be discussed in small groups afterward.

11:07 AM: Attendees are now marking up their thoughts on black/white printouts of the three park-design concepts that have been shown. Key features of all three include a community garden area – which might or might not be a P-Patch site – plus an “expanse” of lawn atop the new reservoir lid, and one option would move the Off-Leash Area’s small/shy dog area, though it was stressed again in response to a question, NOTHING will be taken away from the dog park – one option even calls for an added trail to connect with it. Unless something dramatic happens when the small groups “report back” shortly, our next update will be a full report on the meeting, the discussion, and what’s next, later. 12:45 PM: One addition first – we’d asked for the graphics from the meeting as soon as we could get them, and the project team provided them on a flash drive so we could download them – here’s the “short form” of the presentation, with all three design concepts plus the project priorities. They’ll be broken out individually in the aforementioned full report later. ADDED: We’re adding highlights of the hearing incrementally:Read More

Barely a block from High Point Playfield (subject of our previous story), construction is finally about to start for the park atop newly buried Myrtle Reservoir. It came up in the WSB Forums last week; now Cindi Barker of Morgan Community Association has confirmation from Parks’ project manager Virginia Hassinger that the project’s going out to bid, with bids to be opened May 12th, construction to follow. (This’ll be on the agenda at MoCA’s quarterly meeting Wednesday night, 7 pm @ The Kenney.)