Portland Parks & Recreation Faces Field Usage and Code Challenges

The near freezing temps last Thursday evening did not deter nine concerned neighbors from attending a meeting hosted by Portland Parks and Recreation (PP&R), Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS), and Portland Public Schools (PPS) in the basement cafeteria at Rigler Elementary School.

The meeting focused on proposed code changes that affect some of the City's most popular pastimes—outdoor, recreational fields for sports play. With 130 fields in our City's parks and schools, and almost 150,000 total hours of scheduled/permitted fields usage by youth through adult leagues playing football, soccer, baseball, kickball, lacrosse, and other team sports, "the cost to maintain a safe level of play," noted Shawn Rogers, Customer Service Manager for PP&R (when I interviewed him for our previous article on our popular adult sports leagues, "is one of our greatest challenges." Earlier this fall, Rogers spoke to me about the permitting process at PP&R, in the hierarchy of usage, and how hard athletes of all shapes, ages, and sizes really are on our public fields. Some little known, but fascinating facts include:

• Youth parks and recreation programs get first dibs on field usage, then PPS, other area public schools, adult leagues, and then the general public. All users need to go through the permitting process.

• The maximum number of hours a grass field can sustain safe play per year is 600.

• Most field damage occurs during the rainy season (duh) so many fields are often closed during treacherous storms even though hard-core teams (like soccer) are ready for action. PP&R tries to minimize use to protect fields from future prohibitive rehab costs.

• Kickball is the fastest growing team sport as seen by field usage requests in the last few years.

• PP&R may move to a "pay per use/per hour" model in the near future. Rate increases may reach up to 33% next year.

PP&R focuses on meeting challenges in the most productive way possible, with the best interest of multiple stakeholders at heart. With thousands of teams playing various sports using the facilities year round, field usage is nearly always booked—some premium fields have a two-year wait list. There's certainly "down time" for some sports, depending on the season, and this provides the opportunity to rehab many popular fields.

Javier, who pumps my gas, likes to tell me about his soccer team's latest wins at Delta Park, one of the most used locations for this ever-popular sport. He is undeterred by the threat of the seemingly endless rainy season, but notes, "When the field is muddy, it's impossible to have a good game out there." This fall offered the opportunity to review fields that are in "desperate need of rejuvenation"—reseeding, drainage, irrigation, depressions—but because of scheduling, it's a potential strain on the system to take a field out of play. To deal with this most effectively, for example, PP&R's sports field management group moved a soccer field on top of a nearby baseball field, allowing the original location to rest for the season. In March, after the temporary fences are uninstalled, the group will move the soccer field back to its original location, right in time for baseball's peak season to land. When each field improvement takes an average of six months, and five parks need serious and immediate attention, Rogers questions how PP&R can take those five locations out of circulation and deal with the displacement of programs? "We can't improve one at a time—that would take generations to get through all the necessary field improvements. And, with the amount of scheduled play, we are always going to affect somebody."

Since maintaining proper quality of play on our public and school fields is becoming increasingly difficult, and the need for sports fields has risen significantly in recent years (and shows no signs of stopping), PP&R is aware of its responsibility to provide adequate recreational facilities and realizes that any alterations (e.g., additions to facilities, improvements to existing fields, code changes on notifications) impact both users and neighbors. The agenda for the December 10th meeting was geared to focus on City Code clarification for sports field usage, offering additional rationale for dealing with this need, now:

• Current studies regarding obesity and access to nature indicate an increasingly critical need for children and youth to be exposed to outdoor recreational activities.

• Current code language limits our ability to improve existing fields to address the growing need.

• Current code language is ambiguous or silent on when review (and public notice) is required for sports fields.

To this end, PP&R, PPS, and BPS came together to engage the community in learning "about proposed changes designed to improve field access and quality, and better address community impacts." Proposed code changes span alterations and additions of new fields, concession areas, field lighting, voice amplification, seating, parking, age conversion, development standards, and loss of conditional use status. We were told that feedback provided to the staff on these areas will ideally "help further shape this proposal", though one committed neighbor stated at our meeting's start that he felt that PP&R "had already made up its mind about code changes and was just here to market their ideas to us, without true regard for neighborhood impacts." He was assured that PP&R, PPS, and neighbors have "different expectations about how to engage in the process. We want to find out what is significant here. Parks has a lot of information from PPS and neighbors alike about what doesn't work."

We did, however, all agree that "fields provide a viable benefit to our community and that parks need to be used to their highest and best purpose." With this in mind, we learned:

• The City of Portland Planning Commission asked PP&R to deal with changing the current code making it more realistic for all users.

• Schools and parks are treated differently in the code.

• The notification process (for neighbors, about special events and changes) is not consistent and "needs to be fixed" - that is, PP&R is committed to increasing neighbor notifications.

• The current review process is cumbersome - whether you're putting in one parking space or a small bleacher, there are exceedingly high fees (upwards of $12K), and a 15-week review, with no guarantees that it goes through.

Code Changes
What's not changing in the current code is the conditional use process for new field lighting, adding or removing more than five parking spaces, adding large bleachers, and creating ‘passive park space' (fields with no organized sports play). Straightforward (or "not confrontational") code changes, presented by PP&R's Brett Horner, include the addition of concession stands within 400 feet of homes and amplified sound use at parks as situations that should require neighbor notice. One of the provided handouts outlined existing codes and proposed code changes, including threshold/requirements, review/notice types, and Good Neighbor Agreement options. We were also given draft documents of "Good Neighbor Agreements," "Guidelines for Permitting and Use of Athletic Facilities", and "Field Improvement Code Change Overview." You can find these drafts online along with other interesting public policy documents (for those so inclined).

(At least) six staff representing the three organizing groups led our small but attentive audience through some background and context (some outlined above) as a lead-in to a "table exercise." We split into two groups and reviewed enlarged maps of an existing school field and an existing park field, prompts to facilitate our discussion on how proposed code changes might play out in "the real world." My team went through three scenarios for both school and park—an age conversion (changing a youth field to older adult sports league play), adding a field, and adding bleachers. We talked about what the current code states in each instance, and what the proposed changes could really offer users and neighbors alike. The conversation in both groups, of course, wandered off into other realms, and so we came together to "report out" and review other concerns: how to establish and enforce Good Neighbor Agreements with multiple parties, some not neighbors; how to move away from a complaint-driven process; how to enforce the permitting process; right to free play and pick-up games (especially for kids unable to join often expensive sports teams); signage regulation; the addition of fields in neighborhoods where kids live and want to play; other triggers for neighborhood noticing; dealing with facilities wallowing in poor condition; field use prioritization. And more.

The parks code change conversation is far from over. The staff encouraged us to review the draft documents, reflect on our discussion, and submit written comments on the proposed code changes by Monday, December 14th (directly to Elizabeth.Kennedy-Wong@ci.portland.or.us, who was in attendance). A summary of these comments, and the new language in the draft documents (and, hopefully, the meeting's minutes) will be sent to all meeting attendees (and perhaps accessed online) by December 21. What happens next? All information is submitted to the Planning Commission in preparation for their hearing on January 12th. See you there, neighbors.