A Foolish Mortal on Real Property Reports

Dear Diary,

I've been plugging away at my sources, compiling lists to turn into maps for my baseline hikes.  So I've been getting increasingly frustrated about the parks omitted from recent real property reports.

So frustrated that, to my considerable regret, I actually wrote an e-mail to the Real Estate Services people who compile those reports.  As an object lesson in advanced foot-in-mouth techniques, the e-mail follows, adding in [brackets] park names, plus footnotes identifying my errors.

Hello

I'm the writer of "My Seattle Parks Diary".  For information about Seattle's parks, the real property reports your office produces are a major source.  I'm extremely grateful for them.  Thank you!

However, I've long been troubled by the slimming of the report in 2021, which as far as I can now tell has not been reversed, by omitting whole categories of city real estate that weren't and apparently aren't owned, or that were collapsed into other city property.

In a post on May 3, 2021, I listed PMAs omitted:

4156 [Ingraham High School Playfield], 4167 [Cedar Park], 4442 [Laurelhurst Recreation Center] - agreements with schools

4477 [Waldo Woods] - other agreement with outsiders (and I have no idea why 4615 [Maple Springs Natural Area], also made out of easements, is still listed [A])

4450 [Bitter Lake Reservoir Open Space Park] - agreement with another city agency

3903 [Sunnyside Ave N Boat Ramp], 3975 [NE 60th St Park], 4010 [14th Ave NW Boat Ramp], 4011 [Fremont Canal Park], 4083 [Waterway 19], 4161 [NW 60th St Viewpoint], 4452 [Northlake Park], 4464 [Haller Lake Community Street End], 4598 [Wallingford Steps], [4599 Troll's Knoll Park ,] [B] 4619 [Gemenskap Park] - rolled into the great asset never reported, the streets [C].  In the case of 4083 this is almost certainly incorrect; the waterways are normally state property, and Waterway 19 is at the end of no street.

I understand that none of these was or is necessarily a lease (though I'd bet 4083 actually is), but leases are the easiest category to address.  Surely your office must keep track of them, and could produce a leased property report, say.  I'm currently reviving my blog after several years as a full-time student, and not knowing beans about the city's leases, after all this time, adds to my work.

Was there a good, specific reason for excluding leased property [D]?   Were the city's landlords getting harassed, say?  Or was it out of some sense that the real property report was too broad, and somehow ought to report only what the city owns, and (despite the omission of the streets [C again, dug a little deeper]) add up to a reliable total?

Thank you for your attention.

Whoosh.

A - They replied the next day, and that night, I found actual city property in Maple Springs Natural Area, in the King County Parcel Viewer, just as the real property reports say.  Oops.

B - Yes, I left one out of the e-mail.

C - I'd always assumed the city owned the streets.  Turns out this is not normally true, and I'll have more to say about this soon.  The only thing I got right about this was calling the streets a city asset.  They're easements, and so they are in fact assets, but that doesn't mean Seattle owns them.

D - The reply was kind of a work of art.  In the guise of dunderheaded obstinacy, refusing to understand my question, it casually mentioned the one clue I actually needed to see much, much more clearly.

Seattle City Council Resolution 31837 of 2018 is the fourth in a chain of resolutions concerning procedures for the disposition of city real estate, following 29799 in 1998, 30862 in 2006, and 31770 in 2017.  Unlike any of those, 31837 goes into detail about an annual report listing property owned in "fee simple", to be compiled by Real Estate Services.

The 2013 real property report, the oldest I've found, cites 29799 and 30862.  And it says "While the bulk of City property is owned in fee simple, the City also leases or obtains easement interests when appropriate.  Agreements with other public agencies provide another type of property right, e.g., the Seattle School District and Department of Parks and Recreation have agreements which provide for mutual use of certain parks and playgrounds."

What 31837 did was mandate that this report list only fee simple ownership.  Because, you see, dear Diary, the only purpose listing city real estate could possibly have is using surplus real estate for affordable housing, and leases, easements (including the streets) and agreements - none of those help with that.

Gotta love virtue signalling.

But anyway, what I'm left with is that for two years after Real Estate Services got its marching orders, it ignored them.  And if it hadn't done so, my hikes and your pages would've been much more boring.  So I'm immensely grateful to whichever bureaucratic maverick enabled me to start writing you with full information, before the burden of virtue signalling started preventing that. 

And does anyone else want Seattle to release information about its leases?

To the Beaches!

Dear Diary,

Today's page was always going to be kind of short - there just aren't that many parks in the part of northeastern Seattle in question.  But last night it got even shorter because I deleted two of the photos by mistake.

Chinook Passage Natural Area

Since I was going to pass this park, introduced May 6 in "Go North, Aging Man!", no matter what - 95th St, along which it lies, being the obvious way to get from 35th Ave to the next park - I figured I should take pictures.  Now, if one read yesterday's page "Six Parks in Search of Another" much more closely than it deserves, it would be clear that these were the first photos I took on October 12 since my visit to Lavilla Meadows Natural Area.  (I don't know, by the way, whether Lavilla or LaVilla is correct, but La Villa certainly isn't.)

The photos of Lavilla Meadows were of a lot of undergrowth, plus, in one, a sign.  Now, one of the photos of Chinook Passage was like that, sign plus greenery, but the other was meant to use a streetside break in the wall of trees to show the depth of this two and a half acre forest.  As usual when I try that kind of thing, the photo was a failure.  So for practical purposes the Lavilla Meadows and Chinook Passage photos, next to each other in my chronologically sorted photo bin, looked pretty much alike.  And last night when I deleted from my phone the photos I'd just put into you, dear Diary, I seem to have deleted both pairs.  Sorry, but, well, not very sorry.

Matthews Beach

This 22-acre park was always going to be the main one in this page.  I introduced it in the same page as Chinook Passage, not only without photos, but without enough exploration to convince me I'd found all its water fountains.  All summer I meant to get back - until the rain June 27 started, it was on my list for that day - but it never happened.

But it turns out that the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation offers free reservations for groups of picnic tables in some parks, including Matthews Beach, as well as paid reservations for picnic shelters.  And it offers maps of both sets of parks.  So this time I had a map, and no excuse for not doing the job right.

So what did I find?

First of all, the water fountain I found before really is the only one.

Free-standing water fountain near the restrooms - ON, but it tasted bad

Second, the seasonal restrooms were of course locked - I asked Rachel Schulkin, communications manager for the department, whether they'd been opened at all this year, but she didn't answer.

Third, more worrisomely, one of the two all-gender stalls that are supposed to be open year round was boarded up, I kid you not:

and the other was locked.  Turns out this was just someone camping in there - I ended up coming back a few days later, and it was open.  But these are the only park restrooms open year round in a vast stretch of North Seattle, with Little Brook and Meadowbrook closed.  (I verified the latter yesterday; the sign announcing the closure was still up, dated November 23.)  In general I prefer the dignity offered by a lockable door, but it worries me that so many of the year round restrooms offer that dignity, since it makes camping in the stalls workable.  (The exceptions, in "NE", are at Dahl and View Ridge Playfields and in Magnuson Park.  All in a row down the middle.)

And what else?

Basically a lot of photogenic waterfront.  Matthews Beach has several trails, but not so many woods, so most parts of the park effectively look lakeward.

The main exception is in the southeast, where Thornton Creek enters the lake.  I'll talk about the woods there in an upcoming page; for now I just want to show you, dear Diary, the map of the watershed that revealed to me the existence of Meadowbrook Pond:

Maple Springs Natural Area

The only other departmental park anywhere near there is, um, different.  It's basically the woods behind dead ends at 40th Ave and 91st St.  I was coming from the north, so I started at 40th:

Well, um, good to know about the wasps, but...

At 91st the signs are clearer:

In other words, this park is closed to the public, because parts of it, which apparently can't be disentangled from the rest, are private land.  I actually find this reassuring; like Waldo Woods, it shows the department trying to preserve land even if it can't open that land up.  In this regard, the department's heart is in the right place.

From there I headed practically straight south to View Ridge Playfield's picnic shelter.  So ended October 12, near the end of this long hike.

Until tomorrow, dear Diary, a good day and a good night.