Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 8, Issue 4, April 2004

Copyright 2004 Seattle Sun. Please feel free to use the article below in your research. Be sure to cite the Seattle Sun as your source.

POLITICALLY SPEAKING:

Ballard skate park battle deserves

a true public review

By JAMES BUSH

Landscape architect Barbara Swift entered the March 9 Ballard Civic Center Park design meeting riding a wave of good publicity.

Two days earlier, she'd been the subject of a glowing profile in the Seattle Times Sunday magazine. But, in that story, Swift struck a discordant note when discussing her work in Ballard. "As a process, this has a purity about it," she told the Times. "It's not politicized."

Huh?

OK, maybe even the sunny Swift would admit she was engaged in a round of wishful thinking.

A few facts for the uninitiated: The Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation had long planned to build a new park on the site of the old Safeway store in central Ballard. In the interim, it let volunteers coordinate the construction of a temporary skateboard park on the site, including a concrete skate bowl that has since been recognized as one of the region's best.

The skaters want the bowl to stay. They not only got organized, they seemed to have a reasonable chance of getting it included in the final park design until

Until what? It's hard to say. At some point between the second design meeting in January and the March go-round, the Ballard Bowl disappeared from the park design. The skaters responded by upping the pressure. Their successful SkateJam event on March 6 drew hundreds of supporters, including City Council member Jan Drago, who subsequently issued a press release backing the bowl.

But that wasn't enough to make for a happy March 9 design meeting. The skate contingent sulked and made snide remarks as Swift and the design team struggled to change the subject to grass and trees. The most exciting part of the event came when Ballard planning veteran Stephen Lundgren ended up in a heated discussion with a group of skaters during a break.

Lundgren was merely trying to make a couple of points: 1. The planning process for the Ballard Civic Center predated the existence of the skate park; 2. The Parks Department staffers you're heckling tonight are the exact same folks you'll be asking for skate park money tomorrow.

Both points are well taken. The Ballard Civic Center Plan envisioned the redevelopment of the adjacent QFC site and even included bonus provisions to encourage its developer to build townhouses along the park edge (i.e., right up against the current skate bowl). And the Parks Department now seems to be taking its skate park duties seriously. A site has been identified in Woodland Park (just north of the BMX bike area) and parks staffer Susan Golub is putting together a grant application to submit to the state in early May, which will require expediting the planning process. A couple of possible Ballard sites for a replacement skate park are also under consideration.

What's causing the parks people to suddenly embrace skateboarding? Credit the aggressive political work of the Puget Sound Skatepark Association, which has wisely expanded the battleground to newspaper editorial pages and the TV news. They haven't given up on saving the bowl. When asked his opinion of the Woodland Park proposal at the March 9 meeting, PSSA organizer Jason Harrison replied simply: "We're not here for Woodland Park, we're here for the Ballard Bowl."

Things could get worse. The proposed park design will undergo review before the Board of Parks Commissioners on April 8 (6 p.m., South Lake Union Armory), which means that there will finally be a legitimate public hearing (you know, the kind where people get to talk about issues beyond grass and trees) and an actual vote.

Unfortunately, the Commissioners' role is technically an advisory one; Parks Superintendent Ken Bounds can pretty much do what he wants.

There have obviously been some very important meetings held and decisions made on the Ballard Bowl issue, but they've all happened outside the public view, making for unhappy people on both sides of the issue. If the Parks Commissioners back the bowl, but Bounds balks, the level of rancor would rise.

Why not hand the matter over to the City Council? The park is a City-owned facility and the Ballard Bowl was built, in part, with public money (through a pair of grants from Seattle's Neighborhood Matching Fund). Let everyone hear the arguments on both sides (and see who's making them), have our elected officials take a public vote, and move on.

The design process may be every bit as wonderful as Swift would have us think, but it's proven a lousy forum to properly decide this political issue.