Tequesta Notes
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Monday, September 13, 2021
Update on the Council's Vote
Tequesta Park
We thank Molly Young for opposing the resolution Thursday on Tequesta Park. Ms Young's vote was well-founded in view of the total lack of information and study on numerous aspects of this proposal for a tremendously costly plan that was developed with no consultation at all from residents. As a result of Ms Young's opposition, the proponents (Mr D'Ambra, Mr Stone, and Mr Prince) are moving forward with their plan on the bare minimum of Council support: three votes out of five.
It is also worth noting that once again not a single resident stood up in support of the mayor's plan at the Council meeting. This means that across all the public hearings, not a single resident has voiced support for the plan. In contrast, many residents have stood up in opposition to the mayor's plan.
A Response to Mr D'Ambra
During the Council discussion Mr D'Ambra observed that there have been sports fields in Tequesta Park for a long time and so this justifies his plan.
No, Mr D'Ambra, this is not a justification for the plan.
No one is saying there should be no sports fields at Tequesta Park. Rather, Tequesta residents oppose putting in too many high-maintenance fields and structures with the purpose of making the park a sports tourism destination because this would have substantial harmful effects on the park and on the community. And all this under a process whereby this concept was developed with no consultation from residents. That is what residents rightly oppose.
Mr Stone should have been able to appreciate that even if he likes the idea of more and higher maintenance soccer and baseball fields, the process here was completely unacceptable because it has totally excluded the most important party: the taxpayers and voters of Tequesta. Mr Prince or Mr D'Ambra telling the community that they will listen after-the-fact is not credible when they have doggedly pursued a process that denied residents both key information and also the opporunity to particpate in the conceptualization of this substantial municipal asset. And let's not forget that they were voting on a resolution that restricted discretion to the village manager to modify their design for the park subsequently and further even limited his scope of revision to within the constraints of their concept.
It is worth noting also that when the fields were first put in Tequesta Park, the athletic fields in Jupiter, Jupiter Lighthouse, Jupiter Farms, the huge North Palm Beach athletic complex, and in Palm Beach Gardens—all these did not yet exist. It is perfectly reasonable for the village, decades later in 2021, to reconsider how it might prioritize this park in light of new circumstances notably the excessive, destructive development all around Tequesta and the near total loss of all natural habitat critical for healthy life in all of these neighboring communities.
And in these circumstances it is perfectly reasonable for a community to say, hey, we would like to secure a better balance and build a community that is a healthy home for the families who live in this village and who vote and cover the costs of municipal infrastructure. That is a reasonable point of view and the mayor's process has denied residents the opportunity to consider the effects of his proposal and also alternatives that are far superior and far less expensive.
Moreover, all across the nation and the world, more and more quality schools and communities are recognizing the greater value of natural parks and moving their recreation and education activities into those natural spaces. Whether it is wild kindergartens, or forest schools, or simply a school garden, more communities recognize the substantial and far-reaching benefits of ensuring that children (and adults) have an opportunity to spend significant time in authentic natural spaces.
Natural parks also offer the advantage of providing ecological services that result in a healthier community far beyond the park itself. Awareness of this vital benefit is growing in communities everywhere and it is perfectly legitimate for the residents of Tequesta to refocus parks on these priorities. This is why it is offensive to have imposed a process that locked residents out of the concept development discussion.
Also, if the village were to decide, for example, to upgrade the sports fields but to have a smaller field footprint, we could provide higher quality fields at a lower maintenance cost. We can have playing fields for community recreation without the massive costs of all kinds: the environmental harms to land and water, the loss of ecological services, the significant on-going financial costs that will hamper future village decisions, and the loss of community coherence due to the transience of the sports tourism lifestyle. And we do not need the additional pavement and parking lot; we would rather just have more park!
a reasonable alternative, for example
(click here for a bigger image)
A Response to Mr Stone
Mr Stone noted that he had observed a need for more athletic fields during the youth sports practices at Jupiter Farms.
If the existing sports fields all around us are overbooked at one particular time, the problem is not a lack of fields but rather poor scheduling and the solution is to develop a better schedule.
One way to see this is to imagine a time-lapse movie showing a bird's eye view of the numerous sports fields around here over the course of a year. If you watched that movie, you would see that the vast majority of time, the existing sports fields are completely empty. Then, once in a while, you would see someone come along and put out some poison for the grass and cut the grass. And a very small amount of time, you would see the fields in use.
When you have lots of these fields (as we do!), this is an extraordinarily destructive and wasteful use of a valuable resource. Most of the time this vast space is effectively a desert of death. Nothing beneficial can live there. From an ecological perspective, it is not only not helpful it is harmful to life.
Contrast the same space as a natural park. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week a natural park is working and providing critical ecological services that benefit the health of the land, the water, and our whole community.
This is where you can start to see that Mr Stone is still narrowly focused on a very small special interest. And even most families highly committed to youth sports understand that making the community in Tequesta a healthy home is a more important priority than adding more fields for a marginal increase in scheduling convenience for a few people. Most people realize this is a bad exchange. What Mr Stone is asking for by supporting the mayor's plan, is for the village to assume the burden of a huge expense (financial, environmental, ecological, and community) for a very narrow and selfish convenience.
Also, natural parks, in contrast to sports tourism destinations, are much more versatile and offer many more recreational options for a much broader range of interests. They are available from gate open to gate close for people to run, walk, meet, picnic, and innumerable recreational activities. This is especially true during the hot Florida summer days when the athletic fields are abandoned to the heat mirages. More shade trees instead would make all those spaces much more comfortable and useful for a range of recreational activities.
And even when the gates of a natural park are closed, those parks are still providing valuable ecological services to the whole community.
Learning from the Rec Center
The new Rec Center is under construction and Constitution Park is open. You can go and check it out and there is a lesson here that hopefully the village administration will learn.
Before the Rec Center project got underway, we wrote to the village administration to explain that it would always be a bad idea to exchange outdoor park space for indoor space. Unfortunately they did not listen and we think that the net effect has not been beneficial.
The premium space in Constitution Park is outdoor space, not indoor space. The outdoor space is much more useful. For one thing, it is available from gate open to gate close. The indoor space is not.
When you remove some of the outdoor space, you also diminish the quality of the whole park because the whole park then feels closer. It is not a big park to begin with, so in addition to losing the outdoor space to the bigger footprint of the new Rec Center, the quality of the rest of the park has also been adversely impacted. And of course, the park will now start to feel crowded much sooner because it will be more crowded. There is less space. This loss of quality of the outdoor park is noticeable compared to what it could have been.
So what did the village just do? We took the most valuable asset in this park, the outdoor space, and reduced it in size and diminished its quality. We replaced it with an asset of lower value. And for this exchange, we have paid a significant cost in construction and the on-going maintenance cost will be substantially higher than if we had kept the more valuable outdoor space. This was a terrible exchange and a terrible deal. Let's try not to repeat this kind of mistake with the other parks in the village.
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