I’m REALLY late to the discussion on this. A neighbor was chatting about Pease Park losing disc golf. So I pulled up the Statesman article from June 3rd. WOW! I couldn’t believe what I was reading.
I don’t even play disc golf, but I was left speechless for a minute. Disc golf is one of the reasons Pease Park is a destination. Activity is what draws people into parks. Think about Waterloo Park – little activity, little use, taken over by vagrancy. As best as I could tell, PARD made an executive decision [with little to no public input] to remove the disc golf course.
I’m normally sympathetic to PARD’s challenges and the hard decisions they need to make to keep Austin’s parks clean and accessible for the citizens of Austin. But, this decision truly baffles me. It’s frustrating to see reasons cited like “compacted soil” as sufficient cause to eliminate one of the best nontraditional uses of public space, something that is core to the spirit [and brand] of Austin, IMO.
I love this quote from Matt Odam’s post...
“The city should consider shutting down the Arboretum and tearing up the parking lots so there is much less runoff into Shoal Creek…”
Yeah, but the West Campus resident has a fraction of the impervious cover per capita that the Allandale resident does. Yet somehow the latter is viewed as a fine steward of our resources, and the former some kind of burden.
There’s a lot of impervious cover in neighboring areas like West Campus, as well. If the blame is impervious cover, there’s plenty to go around.
I’m hoping the Parks board considered moving some of the holes out of the creek; some require crossing and being in the bed and banks of the creek. The park is a fairly narrow strip of land, but there should be a solution that doesn’t involve moving the course to a place where few can play it, and fewer still can play without driving there.
A solution is to not move the damn course.
People don’t get it; many (maybe even most) of those disc golf course players are walking down from UT – precisely the kind of patron we should want at our parks. And you and yours are claiming that Guerrero Park is an acceptable substitute – somewhere where everybody will drive to?
Urban parks get heavily used. That’s their purpose. If the creekbed erodes, the flooding from upstream impervious cover in the sacrosanct suburban neighborhoods like Allandale is 99% of the problem anyways.
The City has been attempting to find a solution to this issue for more than ten years. I don’t like the idea of closing such a popular and centrally locate course. But, to avoid closure, it is the players that need to come forward with some solution.