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Letter to the editor

A playful, useful answer

A playground will please students, neighbors and taxpayers.

By ANNE LINDBERG, Times Staff Writer
Published October 3, 2007

Pinellas Park- The problem exists across Pinellas County: lots of development and little space for playgrounds, ballfields, or other places for kids to simply have fun while running off their energy.

Now Pinellas Park has taken a step toward solving that problem. The city and the School Board have a deal that will benefit a school and neighborhood kids.

The city will give $25,000 to Pinellas Park Elementary School to buy a piece of playground equipment with multiple components, such as sliding boards, climbing apparatus and chutes for crawling.

In exchange, the school will keep the playground open after school, on weekends and on holidays to give Pinellas Park children a safe place to play.

It's a win-win-win situation, said Bob Bray, the city's community planning director. The school gets new equipment. The local kids get a place to play. And the taxpayers see public land being fully used rather than locked up when school is not in session.

The concept, Bray said, is "something that, in this county, we need to look at much more closely because we don't have land out there we can use for (recreation). Right now, land costs are more than construction costs for roads."

The city got the idea when it received a letter from the Pinellas Park Elementary PTA asking for help to raise money for the playground, which had no "play apparatus" for the students.

"They thought that was awful," Bray said. "We did, too."

The city talked with the head of the PTA and set aside $25,000 for the play equipment. (This was before the budget crunch set in.) Then school and city officials met with Stephen Fairchild, who is the real property/facilities specialist for the school district.

The deal was struck. The School Board approved the joint-use agreement last month and the City Council approved it last week.

Under the contract, Pinellas Park will pay for the equipment and agree to be liable for its own negligence. The School Board will be responsible for seeing that the playground is open and closed every day and will be liable for its own negligence.

It's unclear when the equipment will be delivered and the playground, at 7520 52nd St. N, will open. The parties will decide that during an upcoming meeting.

This is Pinellas Park's first foray into the joint use of School Board property, but "the city of St. Petersburg really kicked this off a few years ago," Fairchild said.

The joint-use contracts are part of Mayor Rick Baker's push to have playgrounds that are easily accessible to all neighborhoods.

The School Board and St. Petersburg have about 10 joint-use agreements for playgrounds.

The board and city also have similar agreements that provide open space for kids to play soccer and other sports. Gymnasiums for basketball have been the subject of some of the contracts.

Other cities, like Safety Harbor and Dunedin, and Pinellas County have made similar agreements with the school district.

"There's a long list of sites where we have shared recreation agreements with the cities," Fairchild said. "There's been more emphasis on it for the last several years, if for no other reason than the county's built out. There's no available land anymore."

So far, Fairchild said, there have been no complaints about the arrangement. But there is one possible wrinkle. Everyone has to obey school district rules while on property belonging to the board.

That means no smoking or drinking anywhere on the premises, even while waiting for your kids' energy to run down.

[Last modified October 2, 2007, 22:28:18]