Park Pressure With Its Popularity Soaring And Its Equipment Deteriorating, Valley Mission Park Is In Danger Of Being Loved To Death By Users
The most heavily used park in the Spokane Valley needs a partner park to relieve the pressure.
That’s the bottom line for Valley Mission Park, says Wyn Birkenthal, manager of Spokane County Parks and Recreation. And if that’s not possible, improvements and repairs now needed for Valley Mission could easily surmount $1 million.
With its mid-Valley location and proximity to Interstate 90, Valley Mission is used by, well, almost everyone: toddlers and moms, car fanciers, family reunions, horseback riders, dog walkers, sledders, senior citizens, Splashdown patrons, ballplayers, sweaty summer YMCA kids, corporate picnickers - and even an occasional soul seeking some open space.
“It’s a bit of a sanctuary,” Birkenthal says. But the 22-acre park is so crowded with facilities and users, any attempt to improve one area runs into another existing use. Planting more shade trees on the eastern lawn to develop another picnic area, for instance, has to be done just so. Otherwise, the YMCA summer day camp will lose an open area it counts on for games.
Parks supporters took along photographs of Valley Mission’s jammed-packed parking lot when they went to Olympia earlier this year to plug for state money for improvements to Plante’s Ferry Park.
“On summer days, you see cars just circling through the parking lot, looking for an empty spot,” Birkenthal says.
“What the park needs is a partner park nearby to spread some of the pressure.”
A few plans on the horizon could help satisfy the need for Valley park space. The expansion of Plante’s Ferry Park, north of the Spokane River along Upriver Drive, would provide play fields and some picnic area. The development of Mirabeau Point could provide some recreational space.
Meantime, only Valley Mission’s aging swimming pool is up for repairs next year.
Along with the county’s three other pools, the Valley Mission pool may swallow up $966,000 next spring. That would be its second repair job in three years.
County commissioners may decide to support plans for a YMCA pool complex at Maribeau Point. Preliminary talks are under way, according to Commissioner Steve Hasson.
He questions the wisdom of spending a million dollars to maintain the status quo with the county’s “undersized” pools. And given that the park is built on top of a 1950s-era landfill, which is still settling, Hasson and others question the wisdom of locating a pool there at all.
“That pool is not only sinking, but tilting. It’s going to go the way of the tower of Pisa,” Hasson said.
A new, up-to-date pool at Valley Mission could cost up to $750,000.
Consider these other signs of wear and tear at Valley Mission:
The west lawn and picnic area is so routinely crowded during warm weather months, that if the irrigation system popped a leak at 5 p.m. this summer, Birkenthal says, repair crews worked overtime.
“That west lawn gets 16 hours of use a day in the summer,” he says. He’s right. The YMCA summer programs start up at 6 a.m. and softball games run until dusk.
After 25 to 30 years, the irrigation system needs replacement. Cost? “A rough gander would be $250,000,” Birkenthal says. The system’s main line broke five times in 1995 and seven times this year.
“You dig up the line with a backhoe and replace it and 10 days later, it blows up again five feet down” the line, Birkenthal said.
The asphalt pool at the bottom of the hill has been kept dry for years. Despite a fence, it attracts curious toddlers.
Because of the old landfill, removing the asphalt could mean trouble.
“Something needs to be done about it, but I would be scared to touch it,” Birkenthal says. “You might be asking to find old refrigerators, PVCs and Freon.”
Use of Valley Mission is likely to go up in coming years.
“Developers seem to have discovered the value of I-90 frontage,” Birkenthal said, noting the hundreds of new apartment units going up in the area.
Birkenthal estimates Valley Mission now gets easily more than 100,000 visits a year.
“Definitely, in the county parks system, it gets the most use, per square acre. And I don’t know if the city has anything that rivals its use,” he says.
Ironically, an open field marked with prominent “no trespassing” signs sits just south of Valley Mission. The 10 acres or so is owned by Modern Electric Co., and is destined, likely, to house a water tower. Modern Electric manager Mike Baker said the non-profit utility believes that someday it will have to abandon the reservoir just south of I-90 at University. There’s been discussion of a new interchange there.
“We want to be a good neighbor. We’ve had some minor internal discussion about putting a ball field in” opposite Valley Mission, Baker said. But so far, liability concerns and the uncertain timeline of any work at University have prevented any recreation plans.
“Hmmm,” said Birkenthal. “That (water tower) wouldn’t take up the whole field….”
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