THE ''PUBLIC INPUT'' CHARADE HOW PARKS DEPARTMENT ANSWERS TO ORGANIZED SPORTS SYNDICATE
	Loyal Heights Playfield has been a place for a unique blend of activities for 70 years. Athletes and non-athletes alike have shared the field with good cheer and a spirit of community. The park started when kids went door-to- door to collect change for the project. From the very beginning, it was a place where organized sports teams and non-organized community members shared the space, where mixed use was the rule. That made it unique as well. Because if its hybrid character, you’re as likely to see people laying around on the grass as you are to see a game, and we love that about it. That’s what makes it special. We think that removing the grass at Loyal Heights betrays the efforts of neighborhood children who went  door-to- door back then. It’s also unique because no other park in Seattle that is slated for conversion has the small dimensions of Loyal Heights. There are no adjacent arterials, there is limited surrounding buffer, and the park is small. Other parks that have or are getting synthetic turf (such as Genessee, Lower Woodlawn, Interbay) are much bigger, and have synthetic turf as only a small component of the entire park. The plan at Loyal Heights would cover most of the park. Finally, the process was fraudulent and stacked against neighbors from the beginning. There is a key cultural difference between parks/organized sports teams and the rest of us. The organized sports folks were involved early in the process precisely because they were sought out by parks. Starting the process with them put them front and center, and left the rest of us moving on with our daily lives, washing our cars, watching TV, unknowing that key decisions were being made about our park and our neighborhood. Then, when we heard about the public input period and were basically told to get lost, it was very demoralizing. Parks see their natural constituency as organized sports programs, and I think this is a real flaw. We are constituents too, we use the park, we supported the levy, yet our input is really not valued. We wonder what the point was of the public meetings and the Project Advisory Team meetings, where staff scolded members for saying "plastic", and getting everyone all stirred up, what was the point of that? Why bother?