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South Austin Park is
currently a multi-use neighborhood park serving the entire
community. |
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Neighborhood
resident Maya enjoys a beautiful Sunday afternoon
in the park. If the Tennis Center expansion is allowed
to proceed, the entire area behind Maya would be
destroyed to make way for additional courts and expanded
tennis and tournament parking.
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South
Austin Park is a multi-purpose collective public space
that provides a diverse array of enjoyable, health-promoting
activities for the community. It is a pleasant atmosphere
for walking and running; playing Frisbee, baseball,
basketball, soccer, football, or kickball; walking
your dog; having a picnic or birthday party; flying
a kite; bird watching; learning about local ecology;
exploring; relaxing; reading; writing; playing music;
and many other activities. South
Austin Park is truly the neighborhood’s backyard.
Currently,
we have a balance in the South Austin Park—a
mixture of green space and 10 tennis courts. The proposed SATC expansion would disrupt this balance
by converting multi-use community parkland to a single-use, fee-driven facility with limited hours and accessibility.
The South Austin Tennis Center is already a large fixture in the park; its expansion would add 86,000 sq. ft. of impervious cover, nearly doubling its current
footprint.
South
Austin Park is not an appropriate location to house an
expanded tennis center. It wasn’t a good
choice in the early 1980s, when SATC was proposed and
its 10 courts were built; it’s an even
worse candidate now for expansion.
The proposal to expand an already inappropriately-sited
facility violates so many planning principles and highly-publicized
land-use objectives that, in retrospect, it is difficult
to understand why PARD elevated this option above all
others to satisfy tennis proponents. |
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This family
was enjoying kite flying and time on the playground
on a beautiful Spring afternoon in the park. The
area behind them on the north end of the soccer field
would be destroyed if the Tennis Center is expanded
to make way for a 30,000 square foot retention
pond to manage extra runoff from nearly two
acres of additional impervious cover and the loss
of nearly 200 water retaining Juniper trees. West
Bouldin Creek is just behind the wooded area in the
background.
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| The need
is for a net gain in green space in
our increasingly densely populated city, not
a reduction. This
is the call voiced by Mayor Wynn on January 14 when
he asked the City Council to create a proposal calling
for a city bond election in 2006 with one of the
key issues being open
space acquisition.
The development and implementation
principles of the Parks and Recreation Dept. (PARD)
and of city-wide design and development codes demand
preservation of South Austin Park and investment in
expansion and creation of new open green space and
infrastructure.
Central city green spaces are rapidly
diminishing in Austin. The Smart Growth Initiative
recognizes that the “preservation of open space
is essential for the preservation of our quality of
life in central Texas.” Moreover, “open
spaces serve our neighborhoods and greater community
by promoting social and physical activity, as well
as lending identity to our city.” GENA strongly
concurs; the proposed expansion violates the principles
of the City of Austin’s Neighborhood Planning,
Open Space Preservation, and Sustainable Communities
programs. |
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Alternatives
to the destruction of community Green Space |
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Since the
Galindo Neighborhood lies within an area where PARD
has found the “most needed
recreational facilities” to be playgrounds, swimming
pools, and trails, and where PARD found “favorite
outdoor recreation pursuits” to be “walking/hiking,
running/jogging, and bicycling,” it is socially
insensitive and irresponsible to plan a large tennis
facility that consumes most of the open space in the
only neighborhood park. Instead, effort should be made
to improve, expand or create infrastructure, such as
greenbelt parkland (or swimming pools, existing unmaintained
tennis courts, or even just more open green space parkland),
that supports these other more desirable activities.
Potential cost-effective neighborhood-
and commuter-friendly greenbelt-related alternative uses
of funding include:
- connect trail along creek to South
Austin Park and beyond
- build pedestrian bridges across
creek at three locations
- add crossing signals and fencing
at railroad tracks in two locations
- add public picnic areas
- add a 9-hole disc golf course, and/or
build a skate park.
The original SATC design from
the early 1980s can and should be updated to reflect
our community's goals then and now. GENA urges the
City of Austin to exercise good societal and budgetary
judgment by making a course correction that will implement,
not work against the excellent ideas of "smart growth." |
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South
Austin Park / SATC Links |
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