Soccer field or parking lot?
Public meeting on proposal for Washington Park May 13
Staff from Explore Washington Park will present proposed plans to convert the park’s soccer field into a temporary parking lot at an Arlington Heights Neighborhood Association meeting Wednesday, 6 p.m., at the Hoyt Arboretum library. It will accessible through Zoom (this link).
”We will then discuss how best to mobilize residents to oppose the proposed conversion of the soccer field/open space on Southwest Sherwood Avenue to a parking lot,” a statement from the neighborhood association stated.
The Washington Park venues will submit a permit to Portland Parks and Recreation later this month to convert this space into a temporary parking lot.
“We’re asking Parks and Recreation not to approve this permit and instead to explore better congestion solutions that don’t sacrifice one of the last remaining open spaces in the park,” the association said.
Reasons to oppose were listed:
This is one of the last significant green spaces in Washington Park.
Past “temporary” parking solutions have become permanent.
Portland has a shortage of fields for community use.
I guess Portland Parks and Recreation has forgotten the word “Parks” in their name. An open green space becomes a parking lot?
Meanwhile in Slabtown they have the same problem. A cement slab is the park promised (and in some ways paid for) by the residents. Maybe they should have been clear that “slab” was not their vision of a park but referred to the wood piles generated by nearby mills in the early days of the neighborhood.
It appears PPR has now morphed into PBOT with their fixation on parking and paving.
Darcy Wheeles, president of the Arlington Heights Neighborhood Association offered the following correction:
"EWP will attend the AHNA board meetings on Wednesday to discuss its role in transportation management within Washington Park and to provide updates on transportation and parking-related efforts. This has been planned for several months. The proposal to convert the soccer field into a parking lot is the following agenda item. EWP staff attending the AHNA meeting are not decision-makers on the parking lot issue and will not participate in that agenda item."