As neighbors and students who attend Edmonds Heights K-12 (an alternative school in Edmonds), I am writing to ask for your help in opposing the plans of the Edmonds School District and the City of Edmonds to develop the very last open space fields remaining in our city.
Hundreds of people in our neighborhood and throughout Edmonds use this space and enjoy it tremendously. It is a beautiful, pristine field, surrounded by woods and wildlife. Our family goes there to recreate almost every day, rain or shine, and on the weekends. We are surrounded by others who come to walk, run, relax with friends and family, fly model planes, kick balls, fly kites and throw Frisbees. We see it as a tremendous loss to our own health if these fields are converted into turf fields, no longer accessible for recreation because the parking lot and fields themselves are taken over with scheduled sporting events.
The school at that site (Edmonds Heights K-12) has no athletic teams and would not use these fields for sports or PE. Instead, they are being used to teach environmental science — something we’d like to see even more of in the future.
Open, natural spaces are an essential part of a community’s health and well-being. These spaces do so much for us, in reducing stress, luring us outside to be active, to meet and get to know neighbors and fiends, and they can not be taken away.
The San Jose, California, area, where my family lived for a decade, recognizes this. That city, though packed to the brim with people, has thousands of acres of open space available to its residents. Whether you live in the east, west, north or south part of Silicon Valley, there is open space nearby to enjoy. San Jose is not stopping there. They just passed “Measure Q” last November which protects 15,000 more acres for their residents to enjoy.
King County also recognizes this need. They have a goal of protecting 500,000 acres of open space and have currently protected 142,000 acres. Vienna, Austria is the city in the world with the most open space. Each resident has 120 square meters worth, with a whopping 51 percent of their city land protected as such.
I believe the district and our city should re-consider where to locate sports fields, that would have less impact on one neighborhood and certainly would not impact an environment as precious as this.
This map of the comprehensive plan of Edmonds is striking in that it shows visually how little space like this is left to our community: tinyurl.com/EdmondsCPmap.
I beg you to open this link, look at this map and consider how detrimental this would be to develop this space. Please consider helping stop this terrible plan.
Kate Smith is a resident of Edmonds.
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