Daylighting Seattle's parks department

Plenty of landscape awaits work this season, including finding a new superintendent, replacing three Board of Park Commissioners members, and figuring out what to do when the Pro Parks Levy expires next year. All the while trying to accommodate increasingly insistent neighborhood and parks advocates who feel burned by controversies involving Magnuson, Woodland, Gas Works, Loyal Heights, Occidental, and other parks.

It all spells big culture change for a traditionally benign agency used to operating away from the public eye. But with the City Council strengthening oversight of the superintendent (through last November's city charter amendment) and deciding to appoint three commissioners, change seems inevitable.

So far, the reconfigurations are proving a bit rocky. At a meeting last month, Parks and Open Space Advocates (POSA) and interim superintendent B.J. Brooks crossed swords over a recent board shakeup. Brooks says the meeting was more cordial than activists made it out to be and has promised to meet with POSA again. But she's not likely to find tensions relaxed.

Then there's the recent city audit of parks procedures focusing on the Loyal Heights meltdown. Summed up, the audit said mistakes were made, including "administrative errors, poor facilitation, lack of clarity and opportunities lost."

Communications broke down between the Parks Department and the northwest Seattle community over unwanted fake grass ("synthetic turf") and field lighting. From December 2002 to March 2005, the report stated, nothing was done to inform Loyal Heights residents of specific plans. The audit recommended a series of procedures, including professional facilitators, signage of project plans, and more communication (including e-mail lists).

Even as audit results were being formalized, the department planted a section of 16 potentially view-blocking red oaks without soliciting community input. Neighborhood activist Jim Anderson called the planting "the perfect crime" — after all, who could oppose planting trees in a public park?

Saying that, er, more mistakes were made, the department promised to replace the trees with a shorter variety. Anderson, a prickly firebrand with a populist sense of mission (and humor), is only partially mollified: No apology for the department's multiple transgressions has been forthcoming, he notes, despite the audit's recommendation of one.

And the department's provincial sense of protectionism, where commissioners refuse to make e-mail addresses available and hearings on projects or policies are only minimally publicized, is proving downright resilient. For weeks, I have been trying to get a list of potential nominees for the parks board, only to have City Council staff finally suggest I file a public-disclosure request. After I filed a formal request more than a week ago, it took a week for the City Clerk's office to get back. Its response: We'll have something for you in a couple of weeks.

Come on, folks — a public-disclosure request for a list of people who are volunteering for public service? How sensitive can that be?

I went through similar hoops to obtain a list of the mayor's search committee, which has already met and was formed weeks ago, to find a successor to superintendent Ken Bounds, who retired under fire early this year. It took three weeks of asking, albeit no (thankfully) formal public-disclosure request. (Disclosure: Crosscut publisher David Brewster is on the search committee.)

It isn't just the press that gets the cold shoulder. POSA requested late last year to meet with the mayor's office to discuss the superintendent selection process. After six weeks, the group was turned down.

This is all despite seemingly earnest pledges of a new "openness and transparency" from David Della, head of the City Council's parks committee, and parks public-information head Dewey Potter, who told The Seattle Times after the Loyal Heights audit that "a whiff of controversy" would trigger a fresh-air facilitation process with the community.

So smell this: Parks advocates are none too happy with the makeup of the superintendent search committee. They consider the inclusion of Kate Pflaumer, a former U.S. attorney, to be a red flag and exclusion of any POSA member or other community activist a glaring omission.

Pflaumer is the former board chair who, as one observer put it, "threw a hissy fit" and resigned after the City Council moved to shake up the board late last year. Her presence on the committee "is hugely inappropriate," said Cheryl Trivison, a founding member of Seattle Urban Forest Stakeholders.

"Parks and the mayor are missing a golden opportunity to get feedback on the candidates from the people who care most about our parks and open spaces, and with whom the controversies have arisen that led to the ouster of the previous superintendent," said Kit O'Neill, a Ravenna Park activist. "What can they be thinking, to exclude all of those people?"

The mayor makes no excuses. His chief of departmental operations, Ken Nakatsu, said Nickels was aware of POSA's request for representation but "went with others instead." Nonetheless, Nickels feels the committee represents a cross-section of the community, including labor, conservation, housing, and past parks service (several have served on the board). A public-input process is being settled on, Nakatsu said, with the admittedly optimistic goal of a selection by August. (Interim parks chief Brooks says she will apply for the position.)

Politically, it might be argued that parks advocates represent a noisy but easily ignored minority to elected officials. But many also are tireless volunteers doing yeoman service for parks, and their combined voice could prove instrumental to supporting King County's parks levy this August and any potential renewal of city Pro Parks funding.

The mayor has sent mixed signals on Pro Parks, telling City Council members that he will not seek renewal while privately assuring supporters that replacement funds will come from somewhere. If there is a reversal on his part, it might be from not having to solicit taxpayers for megabuck financing of a waterfront tunnel proposition this fall.

Parks advocates did find a scintilla of hope recently when John Barber and Vera Ing, both civic activists, were nominated as commissioners by Della. Ing subsequently withdrew for personal reasons, but Barber's nomination moved forward last week at a council parks committee meeting.

"My reaction to seeing John's name was that I felt yes, there is a God in heaven," Anderson, himself a potential candidate, commented at the committee session.

Barber, who was praised for consistent "constructivism" at the meeting, hopes for "a sifting out process" in the superintendent selection where "we'll find areas of commonality." He hopes the search committee "will go to various sections of the city and listen to what people want in terms of a superintendent." High on his list: scientific credentials and environmental leadership.

Whomever is chosen will need to be comfortable with public pushback. If the agency is to avoid future clashes with community groups, it will have to come up with a more accommodating stratagem than "mistakes were made."

Who's searching

The Seattle mayor's Search Committee for Parks Superintendent: Bill Arntz, former parks board chair and emeritus director of Seattle Aquarium; Bruce Bentley, former parks board chair; David Brewster, founder of Seattle Weekly and Town Hall, and publisher of Crosscut; Margaret Ceis, arboretum committee member and mother of deputy mayor Tim Ceis; Gene Duvernoy, president of Cascade Land Conservancy; James Fearn, former parks board member and Seattle Housing Authority attorney; Andrea John-Smith, fund development and communications officer for Impact Capital, consultant to the Columbia City Revitalization Committee; John Masterjohn, business manager for Local 1239, Public Service and Industrial Employees; Kate Pflaumer, immediate past parks board chair and former U.S. attorney; Joyce Pisnanont, program director for Wilderness Inter-City Leadership Development at the International District Housing Alliance; Ron Sher, Third Place Books founder and board member for the Project for Public Spaces; Chris Towne, board member of the Seattle Parks Foundation.

• Paul Andrews is a former technology columnist for The Seattle Times and co-author of Gates, the biography of Bill. He and his wife, Cecile Andrews, founded the Phinney Ecovillage in North Seattle and are active in neighborhood and civic affairs. Andrews also serves as editorial director for Greenforgood.com, an Edmonds-based green lifestyles startup. Andrews has been active in the fight against the proposed parking garage at Woodland Park Zoo.