These are productive days for Edmonds’ parks department. They are also controversial ones.
Having waited since 1973 to open a new neighborhood park, this year the city plans to open — and name — two: one at the Old Woodway Elementary and one overlooking the Meadowdale Marina at 162nd Street Southwest. Both parks are expected to open this fall.
If that weren’t enough, in the midst of the building flurry, the department is also rewriting its comprehensive plan, which could reshuffle the department’s basic assumptions.
All the activity is keeping parks and recreation director Brian McIntosh on his toes.
Sweeping aside piles of maps and documents loaded on his desk recently, McIntosh acknowledged the busy year his department has entered.
“We are madly pulling all these bits and pieces together,” he said.
Later this month, the city’s planning board will conduct a third public hearing regarding the comprehensive plan. After that, the new plan — which, among other things, calls for increased connectivity between city parks — will likely wind its way to City Council for final approval.
Critics charge that the plan’s finances aren’t ambitious enough. Change could come faster, they say.
The two new, still-unnamed parks will both feature walking trails and play equipment. The smaller park at the Meadowdale Marina will compensate for its lack of size with a breathtaking view, officials said.
Residents seem to want still more.
In recent months, locals have called on the city to institute a parks impact fee, a tax on new homes, which they believe would increase funding for new parks. The city rejected that idea because it would actually decrease park funding, Mayor Gary Haakenson said.
Growing cities need impact fees, but established cities like Edmonds make use of better alternatives like real estate excise taxes, McIntosh said.
Others, including leaders of the influential Southwest Edmonds Neighborhood Association, have asked the city to consider issuing bonds to fuel parks expansion.
“You need a ready set of funds for parks funding and acquisition,” said SENA President Rob Trahms. SENA lobbied successfully against the city’s plan to include a baseball field on the new 5.5-acre Old Woodway Elementary park.
One of the city’s largest needs is ball fields, McIntosh has said.
Before blocking the field, the group failed to convince the city to make the park 11 acres large, which would have permitted space for fields, they believed. There was neither enough need nor money for an 11-acre park, the city said. The extra land was sold to a developer who is building homes.
SENA doesn’t want that to happen again.
“We are trying to get some leadership on the part of the city. We want to get more funding in place,” Trahms said recently. “We were formed by the (Old Woodway Elementary park) issue, but we are about more. It is not just our backyard. We want the best for the whole city.”
Additional money could fix up the Old Woodway High School fields which have fallen into a state of disrepair, Trahms said. Proposed parks that have been on the books for decades could be sped up.
More money, he insisted, means more options.
McIntosh doesn’t dispute that point, but says the department is already doing a lot.
“Our funding is sufficient for the foreseeable future,” he said. “We could probably spend as much money as we could get, but we do things that are priorities.”
The city hopes to complete its section of the Interurban Trail. Construction in Edmonds is scheduled to begin in 2009.
Planning and funding is also in the works for a trail which would connect two of the department’s largest properties — 50-acre Yost Park and 23-acre Park Ridge Park.
Improving the city’s ball fields will come mostly through partnership with the Edmonds School District, which owns a lot of property in the city, McIntosh said.
Most residents in the city have easy access to a local park. Still, the city’s new plan identifies three areas that are underserved, three half-mile circles centered roughly on 196th Street Southwest and Olympic View Drive, 72nd Avenue West and 180th Street Southwest, and 206th Street Southwest and 80th Avenue West.
Asking residents for a bond isn’t advisable, McIntosh said.
A project like Old Woodway High School is particularly ill-suited, he said. A facility like that would be used by the entire region, not just Edmonds residents, McIntosh said.
Arguments like that aren’t keeping SENA at bay. Projects in the city aren’t getting built quickly enough, Trahms said.
The city should let voters decide to speed things up, Trahms said.
“If the residents say no, then that’s an interesting comment. That would be that,” he said. “But my guess is that the residents want a nice city to live in.”
Reporter Chris Fyall: 425-673-6525 or cfyall@heraldnet.com.
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