February 22, 2006

By CYDNEY GILLIS
Staff Reporter

Few Seattleites make use of downtown parks such as City Hall Park or Freeway Park because they don’t feel safe. But you can’t make a park feel safe until more people use it.

It’s a Catch-22 the Mayor’s Downtown Parks Task Force has been dealing with for the past 10 months as they try to come up with ways to revitalize Seattle’s 24 urban parks.

Last week, the 13-member group released a report, titled “Downtown Parks Renaissance,” that includes recommendations for transforming the parks into vibrant, active spaces — minus some of the homeless and low-income residents who sit around in those public spaces now.

Task force member David Brewster, president of the Freeway Park Neighborhood Association, says that was not the group’s intention. But service providers such as Tamara Menteer, director of the low-income Frye Apartments across from the King County Courthouse and City Hall Park, say there’s no other way to read certain recommendations. Among them:

• Add parks activities by making it easier to get event permits and by turning over concert programming to an entity such as the Downtown Seattle Association, whose president, Kate Joncas, co-chairs the task force.

• Create a new downtown parks division to separately maintain urban parks.

• Coordinate efforts by creating long-term plans and by designating a cross-agency city staffer to solve jurisdictional issues — for instance, between the parks and transportation departments.

• Fence some parks. Brewster says the idea is to fence only the ornamental “pocket parks” on traffic islands or where angled streets meet.

“ We thought that might be a way to get them looking good and keep them looking good,” he says. To Menteer, putting up a fence means “stop sleeping,” she says with a laugh.

• Hire park rangers to provide information and keep things civil, including “monitoring permits for meal programs operating in the parks.”

Brewster says rangers would cost less than police officers and be friendlier, offering people the reassurance of a “Smokey the Bear” figure. City Councilmember Peter Steinbrueck calls them “Pinkerton cops” — after the detective agency notorious for strikebreaking. If there are drug dealers in the parks, Steinbrueck says, “then why aren’t the cops out there busting them instead of blaming the homeless?”

• Target panhandlers by changing city law to make a current ordinance that outlaws aggressive panhandling apply to parks.

Menteer says the rangers could easily use the law to drive away the homeless and destitute. One tenant at the Frye, she says, is diabetic and can no longer walk, but has no benefits or other assistance from which to pay rent. “You know they’re out there panhandling,” Menteer says — something she says many higher-income people just don’t want to see.

“ This has been going on for decades,” Steinbrueck says. “It always to boil down to what people aren’t saying, which is the homeless problem.” 

[Events]

The Mayor’s Downtown Parks Task Force will take public comments at two forums on Wed., Jan. 18, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., at the Seattle Parks Department headquarters, 100 Dexter Ave. N., and on Fri., Jan. 27, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., in Room L280 of City Hall, 600 Fourth Ave. For information, call Kevin Bergsrud, 206-684-5831 or e-mail kevin.bergsrud@seattle.gov. The task force report is online at www.seattle.gov/parks/projects/downtown.asp.