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Community Corner

Palisades Park: Will restoration endure?

Or will group-training camps revert to unsustainable abuse?

Friends of Palisades Park are delighted with the new restoration efforts at our city's iconic landmark. 

But will the restoration last if the city permits 20 new boot camps?

The City Council is being asked (item 7a on agenda Oct 8th) to sanction 20 commercial training groups with up to 15 members each, all potentially operating at the same time. The impact from such a daily pounding on the grasses and soils is bound to be significant on such a fragile ecosystem.

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How will the city monitor such impacts? They do not say. When will it decide enough is enough? They do not say. Will they allow the land to return to the former degradation, a condition which it tolerated for many years and brought about by excessive abuse from trainers and boot camps

Will the current restoration effort proceed to all areas of the park, to all the proposed and currently degraded zones? There is unfortunately no known plan for the park's complete restoration, nor is it mentioned in the staff proposal.

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Thus we urge the Council to establish a moratorium on all commercial training groups until full restoration has been completed, wait until all the grasses and soils have been fully restored in all the five zones of proposed training. This way the City staff and landscape division will have established a benchmark — full restoration. They, we, the public, and the park's caretakers will all have a clear benchmark to gauge impacts from boot camps.

 At that point, we believe, the city could introduce a limited number of training groups (no more than one per zone), monitoring each one for their impact on the soils and grasses. They would of course need to establish another benchmark upon which to trigger protective actions.  But that would not be hard to do.

We also believe all licensed trainers should be required to follow established guidelines for sustainable use. Such guidelines currently do not exist.

But even this proposed compromise sidesteps three important questions, which we ask the Council to also address:

1. Is Palisades Park active or passive? Historically it has always been a passive park. It has been designed and managed so since its founding. Please see our page: Is Palisades Park Active of Passive?

2. Does the city really want to set a precedent of monetizing our public parks? How, for example, would a commercial trainer be distinguished from a commercial vendor selling gum or sun glasses?

3. Is the city prepared to maintain the park for active use? The costs may be very high. Please see our page on managing for active use. 

Please find supporting data and images at our website: Friends of Palisades Park.net where you can also sign the petition: Keep Palisades Park Green


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