seattle

Holy Moly, That’s Big!

/ Seattle Park Lover / 1 Comment

Up until about fifteen minutes ago I was impressed with the size of many of Seattle’s parks. Now my bubble has been burst.

Discovery is Seattle’s largest park with over 500 acres. Now I’ve discovered that several Discovery Parks would fit into the largest city parks around the US. Seattle has about 6,200 acres of parkland in total. Imagine my surprise when I read that there are single city parks with almost as much or more acreage.

If you’d like to see the list go to this post at the City Parks blog.

Be Careful at Carkeek

/ Seattle Park Lover / 5 Comments

I was at Carkeek Park last night and discovered that the park road did not come through the frozen winter and spring melt unscathed. (That may be an overly dramatic description of Seattle weather, but we did have a real winter this year.)  There are several quite serious potholes. So be careful driving through lest you break your car.

Also, on my way out I saw two glittering piles of car window glass on the pavement in the lower meadow parking area. Obviously two cars had been broken into, probably while their owners were out on the trails.

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that Seattle’s most popular parks attract thieves along with lovers of the great outdoors. Golden Gardens can be especially bad at times. If you will be leaving your car at a park for an extended time in order to take a promenade, hike a trail, or picnic somewhere in the distance, make sure you don’t leave anything visible in the car that would tempt someone to break in and grab it. Whenever possible, try to engage in your park activities in sight of where you parked so you can keep an eye on things.

 

Seattle Parks Report

/ Seattle Park Lover / 2 Comments

In 2014 the voters of Seattle approved the creation of the Seattle Park District. The District has taxing authority beyond limits placed on the City of Seattle by law. This new source of tax revenue provides urgently needed stable funding for maintaining, improving, and increasing Seattle parks, community centers, and recreation programs. At the time the Park District was created Seattle Parks and Rec was suffering from $267 million worth of delayed maintenance due to lack of funds.

2016 was the first full year of the new District’s operations. A report has just been released so tax payers can see where and how their money was spent last year. 59% of the 2016 budget went towards getting a start on the huge backlog of delayed maintenance.

If you are interested in reading the report, go to this Parkways blog post and click on the 2016 Report to the Community link. The report will automatically download in PDF format.

Speaking of Gardens…

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I mentioned community gardens in my post yesterday morning. Today my email inbox announced a new post on the City Parks Blog about public community gardens. Perfect timing.

Seattle is currently ranked 5th in the US (among the 100 largest cities) for number of community garden sites and also for number of plots per thousand residents. (We didn’t make it into the top 5 for total number of individual plots.) Considering Seattle is only the 20th largest city in the US I’d say we’re doing pretty good.

If you’d like to see the City Parks post for yourself you can read it here.