August 5, 2020 | Letter No. 2
IOWA CITY â Parks are not experienced the way other city services are.
If the city stopped picking up recycling, it wouldnât matter if you were in Lemme, Lucas, Hoover, or Twain. You would notice. If Northside residents were able to recycle glass, but Southside residents werenât, you bet youâd hear about it (a letter on glass recycling forthcoming).
If a service was considerably different in one neighborhood than another, there would be serious equity problems. But thatâs the reality of our park system. Wading through the Iowa City Master Plan, youâll see a tremendous diversity in uses from park-to-park. While Chadek Green Park is a place to learn and reflect (both categories meticulously defined by staff), Hickory Hill Park is a place to âGo Wildâ and connect with others.
Juli Seydell Johnson told me one of her charges as Iowa Cityâs parks director is to maintain a balance of these uses across her system. I was talking to her about complaints some residents brought about some proposed park prairie plantings. She cautioned me that the people bringing those complaints arenât thinking about the balance sheâs trying to maintain.
âWe make observations and changes based on the total (parks) system,â she said. âThose observations are objective because they donât have a vested interest in one park over another.â
No matter what neighborhood you come from, youâre going to want clean water from the tap. But users based on their positionality are going to have different needs from a park.
As an example, I live just down the road from North Market Park. Underneath the gaze of Horace Mann Elementary sit a basketball court, a playground, and pavilion with picnic tables. I was never very good shooting baskets, and Law and Order SVU reruns made me too self-conscious to hang around a playground. However, the shaded benches are among my favorites spots in town. Itâs where I told my fianceâs parents about my intention to propose last December.
Itâs a special place. To me.
If I learned that the Parks Department decided without any public comment to tear down the pavilion to add a splash pad, I would be upset. I would have lost my reading space. My socially-distant social destination. I donât use the whole park; I treasure certain uses in the park.
In the spring when the city announced how it was spreading 86 acres of prairie plantings across the park, it should be unsurprising that there were people upset that parts of their park were changing. The complaint I heard over and over was that there should have been meeting before the uses of sections of their parks were changed.
Seydell Johnson and her staff used their expertise to find places for the prairie. She argued this was a maintenance issue, no different than repairing a sidewalk. And if her staff needed to solicit public feedback for every maintenance issue that came up, they wouldnât get anything done.
To quiet down the NIMBY chorus, the prairie plantings were reduced from 86 to 57 acres. The parks residents determined problematic were in some cases completely removed from the planting plan.
But we are seeing the same problem come to the Council again. This time, the baseball field at Happy Hollow Park has had its skinned infiled replaced with grass. As of Tuesday night, a petition had gathered 438 signatures demanding the restoration of the infield. The city has argued that this change has been in Councils hands as long ago as October 2019. And furthermore, they believe that removing the infield was a good answer to balancing the park for other uses like soccer.
Still softball and baseball players, some Northside parents, etc. have found a beloved feature of their park removed. And now they are looking to Council to change it back.
Tuesday night, Council kicked the can until Parks & Recreationâs next outreach campaign with the area in 2022. COVID has made the budget tight so many were unwilling to uncover a pitch after the grass was just put down. And given that the issue trumpeted was a lack of public comment on the change, some felt it in bad taste to make another change without a meeting. But like with spring prairie plantings, thereâs a problem we havenât solved.
These credentialed, experienced staff members are making decisions that are impacting park uses that are experienced differently than any other service offered by the city. They are experienced personally, particularly neighborhood parks like Happy Hollow. On one hand, the come away might be that staff needs to just bite the bullet and spend more time gathering public feedback to inform their decisions. On the other, maybe there is a certain amount of stomach pain we should expect when working on parks. But those feel unsatisfying.
In my mind, the central issue here is surprise. In my interviews with residents about the prairie plantings, the word that kept coming up was how surprised they were that this was happening. Yes, it was a slope thatâs difficult to sit on, but it was my slope they were changing.
If asked about this, city staff will, as always, point to the master plan. The one that they spent a lot of time on. The one that got a lot of feedback. Itâs a sprawling plan packed with information. But for those outside the city, for those not used to going through comprehensive plans, for those who just want to know whatâs going on with their park, we donât have good avenues for them.
Itâs difficult to be a casually engaged citizen. I donât believe that someone should have to read through several hundred-page City Council packet in order to know whats going on in our city. I think it should be relatively easy to get information on these planned changes to the park near where they live. The cityâs website already has a page devoted to each park.
Look at how it is depicting information about the pursuit of the 17-point Iowa Freedom Rider resolution. The status report includes summary information and timelines for the next steps that frankly make it a better resource than anything I could write. Itâs clear documentation being used to communicate competence. Yes, these changes are in the works, and here is what the works looks like.
I hope the city will not limit this approach to just the IFR resolution. With all the expertise and experience working within city hall, it seems like communicating this competence is an easy win: communicating competence by removing some surprise.
Your friendly neighborhood reporter,
Zachary Oren Smith
From my notebook
Amended: Council puts TIF toward Climate Action Goals â Tuesday night, Iowa City Council amended three urban renewal area plans so the leftover tax increments for each could be used to finance energy efficiency improvements. In the future, eligible commercial and industrial property owners will be able to apply for up to 50% matching grants from the city.
Industrial users â like those in the three urban renewal areas â account for 27% of the city's carbon emissions, according to a November 2019 Accelerating Iowa City Climate Actions report. Commercial users account for another 20%.
This could get the city closer to reaching its accelerated Climate Action goals: 40% from 2010 levels by 2030 and reach net-zero emissions by the year 2050.
âş More: Want to read me try and explain TIF financing in public⌠youâve been warned.
Passed: Code amendment for bow hunt â In exchange for one urban deer sharpshoot, Iowa City Council agreed to four years of bow hunts. Previously, Iowa City Code did not allow for arrows to be fired at anything other than inanimate objects. Council voted unanimously to pass the amendment, which changed city code to allow for the firing of arrows at deer as part of the city's coming bow hunts.
âş More: Iowa City prepares for inaugural bow hunt this fall.
Awarded: $2 million Road Resurfacing Project â Council awarded LL Pelling Company of North Liberty a $2.14 million contract to provide maintenance to several stretches of roads around town, including the establishment of new bike lanes.
âş More: What roads are included in the resurfacing project.
Recommended: James Alan McPherson â While no official action was taken, council member Pauline Taylor and Mayor Bruce Teague concurred with some residents who wrote in, asking that an Iowa City park be renamed after essayist and former Iowa City resident James Alan McPherson. In demands published in early June, the Iowa Freedom Riders asked that a park be renamed Black Lives Matter Park. McPherson was the first Black American writer to win a Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
Take five:
Here are some things Iâm reading or reportingâŚ
Back-to-school news: My colleague Hillary Ojeda reports that Iowa City Community School Districtâs Board voted to not begin school â online or in-person â until Sept. 8. (August 4, 2020)
Johnson County is one step closer to an enforceable mask mandate. On Tuesday, the county board of health approved a face-covering requirement with a simple misdemeanor enforcement clause. It will got to the county supervisors at their 9 a.m. Thursday meeting. (August 4, 2020)
My colleague Isaac Hamlet dug deep into some drama at Amanaâs Old Creamery Theatre *drum sting*. Staff posted about the theaterâs issues with diversity and inclusion. Following the postâs deletion a few days later, staff were fired July 2. (August 3, 2020)
One the Iowa Freedom Riderâs demands was to rename a park after Black Lives Matter. There are some folks in town who want to see a park named after the Pulitzer Prize-winning James Alan McPherson. While Iâve yet to read any of his essays (the order at Prarie Lights has been made), I did have this interview tucked in my bookshelf. McPherson told Cammy Brothers: âYou learn to reconcile the distance between your behavior and your professed beliefs and you assume that new persona. That kind of thing is what happened in the South during the Civil Rights Movement, but it got stalled. It was supposed to spread to the North, but when King moved North, he couldnât locate the same core of values. The ethnicity of the North made it difficult for him to practice that kind of moral appeal. So the movement began to falter.â (Iowa Review,
If you want my write up of a City Council meeting, you will eventually have to pay. Meanwhile, Info Warsâ dangerously misinformed lie suggesting the National Institutes of Health said 5G phones caused coronavirus. Nathan Robinson argued in Current Affairs that the cost of paywalls and gatekeepers of information is that misinformation â which doesnât cost as much to produce â circulates freely. (August 2, 2020)