Warning!! Wall of text ahead!! Hey yall! Here are some post-beer notes from the meeting. First, Id like to thank all the people who showed up tonight. Showing up in numbers really helped and we had our voice heard. It was a big step in finding a legitimate home for us. Some highlights: 1) The Oakland Parks and Rec department started the meeting with a song and a sick rap about programing. 2) Kenneth and I learned how to Hula Dance 3) The director of the Parks and Rec, Audrey Jones-Taylor is hella funny, sassy, and really cares about the needs of Oakland. 4) We learned that Oakland has a public waterpark. After the initial introduction and overview of the different issues, we separated into focus groups. Jazz and Sean went to the Sports Programming group. Me, Jose, Elena and both Sams went to Capital Improvements. Kenneth went to Impact Fees. Overall, things were positive. OPR is stoked to have more programming and having people use the parks more in general. Our main hurdle is funding. Currently, only 3% of taxes raised goes towards funding the entire parks and rec department. At the meeting, they asked about two items per breakout group that will get done in four weeks. We made it clear that turning San Antonio into a multi-use court with lights was our goal. Realistically, this isnt going to happen in 4 weeks, but we got the ball rolling and thats a huge step. *following rant expresses my own opinions and may not be reflective of everyone else* Our main opposition seemed to come from the director of Tennis Programing. He was very concerned about funding, costs to resurface and put up lights. He had talked about charging us a fee to use the courts to offset the cost of improvements. I can see wehre hes coming from as funding is a big issue, but I think his suggestion is total B.S. Theres another sports field meeting tomorrow night. I suggest if this suggestion comes up again, we should point out the debacle that happened in San Francisco when they tried imposing permit fees on pick up courts. sanfrancisco.cbslocal/2014/10/16/dropbox-tech-worker-viral-video-prompts-sf-to-change-soccer-rules-at-mission-playground/ To be honest, Tennis dude caught me off guard. He took up a lot of time to talk and did ask for any feedback from our group. One of our facilitators went to ask him a question of current and future tennis use of San Antonio. He then proceeded to dominate the conversation. He complained about soccer folks cutting down his $450 tennis nets. I think you should take that as a sign that people who use San Antonio dont play tennis. Heck, he didnt even know how many courts were at San Antonio. If he brings up this idea of paying for permits at future meetings I think we need to bring up issues of pay-to-play permits does the community a disservice by privatizing public spaces and we dont want to create a divide between people who have the resources to pay to use public spaces and those that dont. He proposed $10/hour fee (which at this point is just a number he pulled for the sake of argument), which he brushed off the as menial and something that doesnt make a big impact. This means that in order to use the courts at our current rate of 1 court a night, for four hours, three nights a week is equal to $6240 for one court or $12480 for two courts. Sure, this might make sense if we had an organized league, or made a profit by teaching lessons. But as a group who plays pick up, I think this suggestion is absurd. Not to mention, this has implications of charging hardcourt soccer and volleyball users to pay $10/hour to use courts that they have the right to use since its a public service. Also, there are 48 other tennis courts in Oakland. Can we please have this one court for people who dont want to play tennis? *end tennis dude rant* The other parks and rec representatives at the Capital Improvements breakout seemed more enthusiastic and were interested in listening to our needs. We gave a brief history of bike polo and where it stands in the nation. We also referenced the courts in SF, Seattle, and Vancouver. One of the representatives (mark was his name?) was really interested in seeing what were about. Maybe we should invite him to a night at Rockridge or a daytime game at San Antonio? We learned that San Antonio has recently installed lights on their paths and would like to install lights on courts and repave surfaces but there are issues they need to solve first. One issue is that there used to be lights in San Antonio, but people kept stealing the copper. Mark suggested staffing the parks and recs center during nights we want to play and running an extension cord to the courts to provide lights in the mean time. Another thing that they brought up that we need to address, is the suggestion of turning only one of the 4 courts into a multi use court. My argument against this (which I didnt think of at the time) is that this will cause real conflict between groups if only one of the four courts has the poles removed and repaved. As a club, we need to be respectful of the other groups who have used this court before us, the soccer folks and the volley ball folks in particular. We got to make sure that they have an ideal space to play as well even if they didnt get the information to attend a community meeting. If one court is visibly nicer than the others, people will fight over the nice court. It sounded like Jazz and Seans breakout group went much better than ours, considering that tennis dude could only take over one conversation at a time. Jazz it sounded like you got some contact info of the people actually in charge of San Antonio and that they were pretty stoked. Im going to draft a thank you email on friday with our requests. Could you check it over and send it to the folks in charge of the park? I think the main thing I want is to change the parks in San Antonio from being called tennis courts to multi use courts. This could potentially sidestep tennis dudes opposition by taking it out of his jurisdiction. Also, I think we should make a point of being willing contributors to the community and that we would like to help out with any volunteer opportunities for San Antonio or any other park that becomes our home. --------- This was brought up in the breakout really briefly but we quickly deflected it. There was talk about complaints about skidmarks on the mosswood tennis courts. Our first line of defense is to not admit we play there. I dont think we should lie, but if they ask, say we play at Rockridge, San Antonio, and San Francisco. In case it gets to a point where we have to address this issue, I think we should counter with: Tire marks dont prevent the courts from being used. Were considerate of when and where we play in Mosswood. Its not like were kicking off little kids playing tennis. We play there at night, when the courts are not being used and we are playing on the side that only has half of the lights working. Were just looking for a home and if they give us a court, we wont mess up the tennis courts. We want to participate in the community and we shouldnt be vilified for trying to be legit and voice our needs. ------ In closing, tonight was really rad. Im glad we went and I hope that real change can come out of participating. But we have to remember that one night of participation can only do so much. We got to keep coming out to these meetings and have a dialogue with the park people.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 07:14:25 +0000
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