It is hard to speak against a park. It is also hard to speak in support of fiscal irresponsibility.
The Edmonds City Council and a number of residents near the former Woodway Elementary property want to keep the long-fallow educational ground for its adopted purpose: a neighborhood park. The problem is that users – save for an ensconced Montessori school – have been getting use of the space for free.
Meanwhile, the owner – the Edmonds School District – is in the midst of a masterful minding of its own store with long overdue divestiture of surplus property. The sale and lease money will leverage voter-approved bond funds to put the district on a much stronger financial and educational footing. Private property owners should keep in mind how that helps when it comes to taxes, where schools take the largest bite.
The lure of “preserving open space” is seductive and, in a society numb to the pitfalls of debt, a particularly dangerous siren song.
Edmonds can’t pay for what it already has. The city can’t pave its roads, and it has no money for sidewalks and it can’t afford to keep city-owned buildings in proper repair, among other budget pinches.
Against this backdrop, the in-the-neighborhood numbers of $10 million for a park, with the attendant $350,000 annual debt payments, hardly appear to be advisable. When combined with the knowledge that the nearly adjacent former Woodway High School site is already on track for redevelopment as active and passive parkland, the Woodway Elementary idea starts to look like the empty and unaffordable calories of frosting on the cake.
Living within means doesn’t come without some pangs. Those with fingers clutching the civic purse strings should remember that deferring discomfort rarely makes it better.
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