SANDPOINT, Idaho – Less than a minute into public comment at Wednesday night’s City Council meeting, Sandpoint Mayor Shelby Rognstad had heard enough.
“Ms. Newton, are you to speak on the Travers Park item,” he inquired, joining the meeting via Zoom on a massive monitor, looking down on the rest of the room. “That is an item that has already been decided by Council. We’ve already heard a lot of public comment on that, we will not be hearing any more public comment on that item this evening.”
After nine seconds of stunned silence, with Ms. Newton still at the podium, Rognstad spoke again.
“Please have a seat,” he said, with the audience returning a smattering of jeers. Within a couple of minutes, the Council Chambers, which started over capacity, half-emptied, with those leaving booing on their way out.
“I’m out here trying to compose myself,” Molly McCahon said minutes later, standing in the parking lot of Sandpoint City Hall.
McCahon was also in the parking lot an hour prior, under very different circumstances. She was leading a protest of around 60 people upset about Sandpoint’s plan to renovate nearby Travers Park, chiefly the plan to build an indoor pickleball and tennis facility where the current playground is located.
“The City of Sandpoint made a decision on our public lands and our public park to completely demolish a beautiful, beautiful playground (and) twenty mature shade trees without the public’s involvement,” she said before the Council meeting.
The city says the indoor court facility was the first part of an approved Parks and Recreation Master Plan in Sept. 2020, later coming to the forefront after they received a $7.5 million gift from James A. Russell and Ginny Russell to build it. They say they considered another park, but the location of Travers made sense due to the safety of the roads leading into it, the abundance of parking and the proximity to Sandpoint High School.
“One of the girls at our high school is currently the reigning State Champion,” City Administrator Jennifer Stapleton said. “We have no indoor sports facilities here to speak of.”
Stapleton also said the city is planting 60 trees to replace the 20 that will be torn down to create the facility, and that the playground will not be destroyed, but moved and expanded on.
According to a timeline presented at last week’s special meeting, they had public outreach from July 2022 to Feb. 2023. Stapleton says, the city has consulted the public throughout the process.
“(This process was) all through public meetings which really started in 2019 with the Parks and Recreation master planning,” Stapleton said. “There were town hall meetings, there were multiple presentations at the Council meetings, there were focus group meetings. And in addition to that we did a community-wide survey that was statistically significant that went out to every resident in Sandpoint.”
However, McCahon feels many of those meetings were formalities.
“There has been no public engagement other than workshops where they present the plan they came up with,” she said. “You can slap some sticky notes on it and say you might want it to be different, but nothing changed.”
