Seattle Press on Line - Proposed Upgrades for Seattle Parks Leave Many With Questions

Whose Park is it, Anyway?

Proposed Upgrades for Seattle Parks Leave Many With Questions

By Adam Richter

Mar 28, 2002 -- Seattle's Parks Department has been collecting public comments for its plans to upgrade the city's athletic fields ever since January. Denise Derr thinks those comments have fallen on deaf ears.

"This is not public involvement," she says. "This is public relations."

Derr lives near the Queen Anne Bowl, a combination football field and running track carved out of Queen Anne Hill's north slope. Artificial field turf covers the playing surface and some residents fear the city will install lights next.

"We miss the green playfield," she says.

Organized leagues for softball, soccer and other sports use most of Seattle's fields most evenings, although neighbors of Queen Anne Bowl managed to limit league play on that field.

Leagues pay to reserve the fields and while Derr sees the merit in those organizations, she suspects the Parks Department listens to them over the residents. "Organized sports leagues are invaluable to the community, but they do not represent the entire public," says Derr.

Seattle's Parks Department, in its 2001-2002 update of the 1997 Joint Parks/School Athletic Field Development Program, suggests increasing the number of playfields with lighting and also adding artificial surfaces to many of those fields. This will allow for year-round use. Grass-only fields must be closed from November through March.

Those upgrades are planned to meet an increasing demand for outdoor sports. But Derr argues that the Parks Department must "have the will to protect the rights of the non-paying public."

Alix Ogden from the Seattle Parks Department understands this position. There are some areas, she says, where the only park available might be a playfield. All the same, she points out that the city has lots of "unprogrammed spaces" that aren't reserved for sports use that the public can enjoy.

It's not just the "non-paying public" that loses access to the city's playfields, however. Because demand is so great--fed by the increasing popularity of soccer and smaller sports such as rugby--many Seattle-based teams are forced to play each other on fields as far away as Lynnwood or Redmond.

"We send an extraordinary amount of people out of Seattle because we don't have enough field space," says Ogden.

The Seattle Rugby Football club frequently plays in Everett for this very reason. Because most of its adult players work during the day, as one might expect, the SRFC can only train at night, which is peak demand time for most fields.

"We have nowhere to go and never have," said the club's vice president Jen Sporleder.

More popular sports than rugby don't have it much easier. Youth and adult soccer are hugely popular in Seattle, but Marty Ehlers from the Co-Rec Soccer Association says during the week, close to half her games between Seattle-based teams have to find fields outside Seattle.

In 2000, according to the City of Seattle Auditor's Office, 44 percent of field reservations went for soccer games; only softball, which reserved playfields 49 percent of the time, is more popular among adults. The remaining seven percent went to other sports.

In the city, only eight out of the city's 50 lighted fields are available for soccer. Ehlers would like to see the Parks Department create more fields with lighting and artificial turf; that way the city can meet the heavy demand for soccer games without sacrificing other sports.

But Alix Ogden says the city doesn't have the room to build more playfields, and would not want to use existing open space for sports activity.

"We're not looking to find any expansive lawn and convert it into a playfield," says Ogden.

But lighted fields draw complaints from neighbors. As a compromise, Ogden's office proposed that the Parks Department turn out field lights at 10:00 at night.

Currently the cutoff time is 10:45.

"If you turn out the lights any earlier you basically eliminate adult baseball or softball," says Ogden. Softball would be exempt from the 10:00 cutoff time. That, to Ehlers, puts too heavy a burden on the other sports.

"This proposal has a good chance of crippling our league," says Ehlers. The Parks Department's plans to turn off the lights earlier "will devastate soccer and they will have zero effect on softball."

The Co-Rec Soccer Association schedules two games a night on the same field. If the lights get turned off at 10:00, those second games wouldn't have time to finish and would be eliminated, says Ehlers. So even if the Parks Department adds more fields, it won't result in greater field availability for most sports.

At this stage the JAFDP is only a draft. The Parks Department will hold another public hearing on April 11 at its offices at 100 Dexter Avenue North. For more information call Alix Ogden at 684-7046 or visit the Parks Department Web site: www.cityofseattle.net/parks.

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