Parks In Peril Need Your Vocal Support

You buy your dream house, but fail to budget enough money to maintain the house. Paint peels off. The grass turns brown because you can’t afford a sprinker system. Your dream home becomes a useless nightmare.

In Spokane County, the parks are like that dream house. They are falling apart, because there is inadequate money allotted to maintain them.

Rotting playground equipment had to be removed from six county parks. At Edgecliff Park, balls bounce into the street; the fence is too low to keep them inside. It’s a senseless shame.

The reason? The county has never had an adequate funding system to maintain the parks. This year’s $1.1 million budget for parks was only 1 percent of the county’s budget. Meanwhile, the county’s getting richer. Revenues are on the rise. But county commissioners say they can’t guarantee parks a larger budget slice because they need the money for law enforcement.

Someone needs to inform the commissioners that they can’t afford NOT to allot more money for the parks, because the parks provide the soul of the community.

Talk about soul: About 2,000 seniors a week use the center at Valley Mission Park. They play billiards and bingo. They chat with one another. They feel alive. But the center’s basement, built over a landfill, slopes 11 inches in 20 feet. The building’s on the road to condemnation. What happens to the seniors then?

Talk about soul: Children form memories in parks. They swing on swings and remember forever the touch of their mom or dad, pushing them higher, higher. What happens when the swings rot?

The best solution seems to be the one proposed by the freeholders - combine the city and the county and guarantee parks 8 percent of the budget. The city of Spokane has done this for years. That’s why you don’t read more about city parks in trouble.

This county problem, however, won’t be solved until county people get crabby about their broken-down parks. This spring, when commissioners announced that three pools had to close due to lack of money to fix them, county residents protested. The money was found, the pools fixed.

County residents must now let their commissioners know that money for parks maintenance must be a priority, not an afterthought. Yell about it. The county’s very soul is at stake.