A lack of playfields is causing a furor in Snohomish County these days. The easy solution is to rezone farmlands into playfields. Playfields on farmland, however, promises to add more daily car trips to Snohomish County’s existing transportation mess. It’s “penny wise and pound foolish,” but not in the way that you might first suspect.
Back in 1996, the Growth Management Act held out the promise that before housing permits were approved, a city or county was supposed to plan and finance the roads, schools and parks needed for new development. This was called concurrency. And concurrency requires political will, management skill and a keen understanding of state GMA law.
Laws are made of words, and words are open to interpretation. The only thing that GMA requires for concurrency is road funds. Parks are not actually required under state law – they’re recommended, encouraged and desired. Snohomish County was one of the hottest housing markets in the United States, so there was a lot more political pressure to build subdivisions than to build parks.
Pressure on Snohomish County’s Planning Department to issue permits for more subdivisions, apartments and strip malls accelerated after 1996. Although the Planning Department held monthly meetings required under state GMA law, the endless cycle of permit approval continued relentlessly.
Since 1996, children throughout Snohomish County have become increasingly overweight, signaling a growing public health problem. Meanwhile, Snohomish County was competing with private developers for land. By 2002, it was easier for county government to turn a blind eye to illegal playfields than to fulfill its own promises to build neighborhood parks.
Without the promised new parks to accommodate all of the new residents, school playgrounds became the de facto parks system. At the same time, childhood obesity and diabetes became increasingly serious problems. Few people pointed out the significant public health costs – in time, health care and transportation costs – of the county’s failure to meet concurrency for parks.
In my view, the people who built playfields on farm property created a solution to an urgent problem. They showed initiative – and were led down a primrose path by the previous county executive and his administration, who decided that turning a blind eye was easier than solving a huge problem.
It’s important to understand what happens when government fails to deliver on its promises. Let’s take a simple example. Suppose we have a soccer team with 10 players. To be conservative, we’ll assume that each child travels an average of four miles to (and from) each practice. In total, the team members travel 40 miles per practice. The team practices two times each week for 10 weeks. Therefore, members of the team travel 40 miles for each of 20 practices. Consequently, this team spends 800 miles traveling to (and from) practice.
Now assume that the average fuel efficiency of the vehicles moving the team members is 30 mpg. Divide the total number of team miles by 30 mpg (800/30). The team members use 26.6 gallons of gas traveling to sports practice. If we figure an average cost per gallon of $2.05, then it costs $54.60 for gas to get team members to practice this season. But we’re not finished yet.
Public policy considers “The Big Picture.” In order to understand the costs for teams in Arlington, Monroe, Lake Stevens, Mill Creek, and throughout Snohomish County, we need to multiply our estimate over many teams. For 10 teams, it’s $546, but for 100 teams it calculates to $5,460 over a single season.
We should also consider how much citizen time is lost commuting to playfields. If each parent spends 40 minutes per week driving to practices, and you have 100 parents carpooling kids to sports, then you begin to understand the amount of time that Snohomish County parents sit in traffic. Add the health costs associated with obesity, high blood pressure or diabetes, and you’ll begin to see that focusing solely on the price of land is a very narrow, erroneous measure of the value of park property.
Today, we’re in an age of increasing child obesity, high gas prices and traffic congestion. Locating playfields on “cheap” farmlands is an easy, quick – but unwise – solution. County government’s responsibility to public health, safety and welfare requires building parks where kids can easily, safely reach them – in urbanizing neighborhoods.
After all, kids only have one childhood. Placing our next generation at risk for obesity, diabetes and related health problems is the classic definition of “pound foolish.” Surely, we have more sense. Don’t we?
Maura Goodwin is a former Snohomish County planning commissioner.
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