The Wellington Hills Sports Complex? No, it's NOT a done deal!

Saturday, April 6, 2013

Revisiting a bad idea

First, the geography lesson

1. See Snohomish County on map.

2. See locations of major Snohomish County cities.

3. See tiny dot at southern border of Snohomish County.

4. See, tiny dot is location of proposed "Regional Park" aka, Wellington HIlls Sports Complex.


5. See colorful drawing.

Using Snohomish County's Department of Parks and Recs "Official Master Plan," I colored over the proposed developed areas:

which are

a. Boundary lines of Park
b. The hard surfaces (sports fields, parking lots, buildings, rent--a-picnic tables and kiddie mazes)
c. General use trails
d. Pond w/ "daylighted" stream
e.  The maintenance house area is Xed out in red.

Conclusion … It sure looks like a lot more of the Park is being developed than has been described by County workers, especially after hearing the touts, "less than 25% of the park will have imperious surfaces".

Ah, the art of speaking with qualifiers, conditionals and with crossed fingers.



PS: After almost a year of following the elephant-in-the-room, I wonder ...

We know government  people "need" to attend conferences which are usually held in far away places ... Hawaii, the Caribbean, Cancun or Disney World … you know, places dedicated to fine-tuning the workplace experience.

Anyway, I don't know for certain, but I think sending parks people to conferences in Las Vegas, Disneyland or whatever city has the Super Bowl just sets the wrong mood when it comes to designing neighborhood parks.

You know what I mean, local parks for people wanting to relax; they wear walking shoes, talk to each other, stroll while holding hands, stop and smell the flowers, picnic on the ground, notice birds and squirrels, toss a Frisbee for 5 minutes, eat sandwiches, drink beer/soda/coffee/tea/water and they listen to the sounds of nothing much happening.

The key word is relax.  If I want to experience traffic, noise and crowds I'll take the family and do the 5PM bumper-to-bumper crawl on I-5. Then we'll go to Sea-Tac, find a boarding area and we'll eat our sandwiches.



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