"We simply ran out of time," says Sheila Hughes, Chief Operating Officer of One Reel Productions. She's referring to One Reel's decision Tuesday to cancel its Summer Nights concert series for 2006, a series that was held last year at South Lake Union and for 14 years previously at Pier 61/62.

But One Reel--which also produces Bumbershoot and Gas Works Park's Fourth of July fireworks event--had been negotiating with the city and with the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department since last August to move the series to Gas Works. What made the timing impossible in large part was that nobody told the residents of Wallingford until late December. The resulting opposition--including a lawsuit, aimed at stopping the series, filed only a week ago by Friends of Gas Works Park--caught One Reel squarely in the midst of a growing number of neighborhood groups angry with a long series of similar current and recent park controversies.

Early the previous Saturday morning, Feb. 25, despite short notice and an ungodly hour, about 200 activists gathered outside Woodland Park Zoo. The event was a protest to coincide with the zoo's garage-design workshop being held that morning. The Zoo project, a massive, four-story, above-ground parking garage on the west side of the zoo, has also drawn fierce opposition. But organizers used the event to bring together for the first time a critical mass of neighborhood groups across the city with a common foe. Ordinarily among the city's least controversial agencies, the Parks and Recreation Department has been targeted by neighborhood critics who claim in almost every case that the city has employed a top-down decision-making process that pits parks constituencies against each other, excludes neighborhoods from critical decisions, and favors institutional and commercial interests over those of ordinary park users.

While the Saturday protest was organized outside the zoo, the two most visible recent controversies have been elsewhere: the cutting of 17 trees as part of a project to improve Pioneer Square's Occidental Park, and the decision to fence off a third of Gas Works Park for the summer to accommodate One Reel's concerts. Friends of Gas Works Park, a non-profit that normally works with the Parks Department, filed a lawsuit Feb. 21 to stop the concerts; the Wallingford Community Council was waiting for a March 1 report to the City Council on proposed mitigation before deciding whether to join the suit.

FGWP founder and past president Cheryl Trivison claims that Mayor Greg Nickels' office and Parks Superintendent Ken Bounds were negotiating with One Reel over the use of Gas Works as early as last August. But community leaders only found out about the plan at a meeting called by Parks on Dec. 22, and Wallingford residents at a public meeting in early January. By that time, Trivison says, it was a done deal. A Dec. 14 e-mail from Parks Communications Manager Dewey Potter to Greg Nickels' office bears this out: "We are almost ready to announce that One Reel will move the series to Gas Works Park. Early in the year we will hold one or more public meetings in Wallingford with the understanding that the decision is made..."

Richard Haag, the award-winning landscape architect who designed Gas Works Park in the early ë70s, was appalled at his creation's fate. "I'm violently opposed to fencing it off and usurping, condemning the park for private gain, a public park." Both Haag and landscape architect Ilze Jones, the 1970s designer of Occidental Park, also submitted community-approved plans for the design of new acreage at Magnuson Park--nature-oriented plans that were rejected by Parks in favor of 11 new playfields, some constructed on wetlands.

While the FGWP lawsuit focused on the lack of a SEPA environmental review, opponents of the concerts also had a number of other concerns: the top-down decision-making process, the use of the park for what is essentially a commercial venture (although One Reel is non-profit), the loss of some of the park for the summer and the difficulty of scheduling traditional events like the Peace Concerts (Trivison: "Somebody reserving a picnic table has to jump through more hoops than One Reel did."), and traditional concerns like parking, noise, traffic, damage to the park, and neighborhood safety.

Many of these latter factors were among the issues a community working group, convened by Parks and including invited local residential and business leaders, has considered as part of its charge to make recommendations to city council. The recommendations, due March 1, were required by a Jan. 30 city council ordinance that authorized $150,000 in city money to make the necessary utility and infrastructure improvements to accommodate the concerts. But in a working group meeting last Wednesday, Feb. 22, Virginia Swanson of Parks' Special Events Office made clear how she would run the effort: "We're not here to write the agreement with One Reel. The Parks Department will do that." (Swanson declined to be interviewed for this article.)

"All that mitigation stuff was things that should have been done in the SEPA [environmental review]," Trivison says. "I know that the suit had a lot to do with their pulling out.... They probably knew that they could not win the suit. The business plan that they used does not work in a city park. It's not just Gas Works. It could be any park in the city. They have to think differently. [Parks] has to think differently."

Few of the Gas Works activists seem to blame One Reel; instead, they feel they were blindsided by the city. For her part, COO Hughes is philosophical: "I'm not sitting around fuming at what happened." But she intends to use Gas Works for the concert series in 2007. "For us it's not over. It's just moving back. Sure, the community piece was part of [our decision], but the infrastructure, the booking, every little piece had to line up perfectly for us to go on sale in April.... We are [still] committed to Gas Works as the best place for this series to go."

While FGWP hoped that its lawsuit will stop the concert series, a lawsuit by Pioneer Square activists failed to stop the cutting of the Occidental Park trees--even though the suit is still pending and scheduled for a May court date. In response to the suit, Parks asked for a $190,000 bond to cover the costs of delaying its project, and the court eventually ordered a bond of $119,000--a sum, says Jones, "that was simply impossible for us to raise." Jones, as the park's original designer, is devastated by the tree cut and the other changes Parks is planning: removal of the pergola, a new stage, coffee stand, and retail space. "I think they're totally inappropriate to the district," she says. "It looks like something out of Bellevue."

"Commercialization of public space, that's what it's all about," Jones sighs. Bif Brigman, former president of the Pioneer Square Community Council and a plaintiff in the suit, agrees bitterly: "I think we're going to see it all over the city. It's a revenue stream they've discovered." And Brigman, like activists involved in many of the other park controversies--the siting of a new skate park at Lower Woodland Park, the Zoo garage, Magnuson Park, the daylighting of Ravenna Creek, the installation of artificial grass at Loyal Heights Playfield--believes Parks was uninterested in public comment and simply rammed home its preferred plan. "It's been really frustrating, the whole marginalizing," Brigman complains. "They don't get to pick and choose who their stakeholders are." Jim Anderson, a neighbor who helped fight Parks' Loyal Heights plan, notes, "They wanted to trot out this fake process and say they already did it."

Potter, Bounds, and other Parks officials strongly disagree. They claim that the Summer Nights agreement with One Reel was an exception, and that the lack of public process there was a function of the short time frame available for making the deal. "Whenever we conduct a public process, it's extremely inclusive," Potter says. "There are many projects where input has resulted in fabulous changes that we would never have thought of."

These criticisms are not entirely new. Jef Jaisun, president of the Ravenna Park Action Council, was helping the Gas Works activists because of his experiences in over a decade of battling Parks over community proposals to daylight Ravenna Creek. While the project is finally moving forward (it's due to be completed his summer), Jaisun says it was only after the Action Council threatened legal action. "About sixty percent of the neighborhood signed off on one plan in 2002-2003. We took it to Parks Commissioners, they approved it 5-1, and then Ken Bounds tore it up because he didn't like it.... I [resent] surreptitious, back-door, backstabbing deals."

Landscape architect and former Judkins Park Community Council president Paul Byron Crane has also been fighting Parks for over a decade, dating back to the completion of the I-90 lid and the parks there. He also singles out Bounds. "I gave up. I had a walk in the park with Ken Bounds. He never followed through.... They built what they wanted to build and they didn't want any community involvement whatsoever." Crane is especially exercised over the two tennis courts in the I-90 lid park--the pristine courts on the Mount Baker side and the dilapidated ones on the Central Area side. "That is the most despicable, deplorable conduct, in how they treat one area that's primarily white and another that's primarily black. It could be a ë50s bus station.... They really haven't done anything south of the ship canal, and when they do they haven't involved people."

With such complaints, and with controversies over the Wallingford Playfield and especially the Queen Anne Bowl, city council in October 1998 passed a resolution calling on the Parks and Recreation Department "to evaluate its public involvement processes concerning facilities acquisition, planning, development and maintenance." Changes in public process were subsequently made, but critics now say that Bounds and his staff are ignoring them. "That [the 1998 changes] isn't how it happened in Pioneer Square," says Brigman.

While Bounds comes in for a remarkable amount of personal hostility from critics ("Bounds has left a long wake of pissed off neighbors," says Loyal Heights' Anderson), many also think Seattle City Council, and current Culture, Arts and Parks chair David Della, have been asleep at the wheel. "They were so patronizing," says FGWP's Trivison. "It boggles my mind why council isn't more on their case," adds Occidental Park designer Jones. "I don't know what's going on there [with Della]," adds Brigman. "He's not meeting with us. We gave him petitions, he never contacted us." Says one city council aide, "The Superintendent will only do as much as the committee chair lets him do."

Ultimately, however, protesters wonder how much of Parks' plans, particularly its drive to appease commercial interests at Gas Works, for a proposed new events center near the Zoo's parking garage, for the developer-friendly remaking of Occidental and Freeway Parks downtown, and so on, is coming from Mayor Greg Nickels. An Aug. 25 letter to Nickels from a board member and the president of One Reel states, "As we discussed with Tim [Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis] on Friday, at your suggestion we are vigorously pursuing the idea of relocation to GWP for long-term site beginning the 2006 season. We are presenting a list of improvements that would be required to happen in order to make this venue feasible for a Summer Nights concert series." Occidental's Jones and Brigman are both convinced Nickels' drive to develop downtown is behind the ramming through of the new Occidental plan. "It's all coming from City Hall," Jones claims. "Parks happens to be executing the intent." Brigman chimes in: "Greg Nickels has no business clearcutting a park, I don't care where it is. We made him mayor, not emperor."

Zoo garage plan opponent and protest organizer Diane Duthweiler summed up the frustration of many of the activists: "The Parks Department and the City Council and the Mayor's office are [all] just blowing us off."

Dewey Potter says the Parks Department will not respond to Saturday's protest. "We're damned if we do and damned if we don't. If we respond to it we look defensive.... We're basically going to ignore it. If any of those people are willing to come and sit down with Ken Bounds and talk, he's absolutely amenable to that." Potter dismisses the critics, as, essentially, NIMBYists: "We don't have the luxury of making decisions only for the immediate neighborhood....We don't work for small groups of people. We work for everybody. There are going to be decisions that people don't like."

Yet Potter, who said on Friday, the day before the rally, that Parks would "certainly not" work to organize opposition to the protest, apparently cared enough to send out a mass e-mail on the previous day, Thursday, to people who have "been a supporter of one or more of the projects listed on the [protest] flier." In the e-mail, Potter asks recipients to "express that support in whatever way you feel is appropriate."

FGWP's Cheryl Trivison was angered by the e-mail. "They are always in control. The rally is one place where they are not in control. The community is voicing what they have to say without being timed, without being limited. They [Parks] just need to stay out. When I read her e-mail asking to rally support against citizens, I was appalled."

Duthweiler hopes Saturday's protest drew attention to Parks' culture. "We're insulted at being called NIMBY's," she says. "They're treating us like we're just a bunch of crabby people.... They take your public comment and then they ignore it." She adds, "I think we represent the majority opinion."

But Judkin Park's Crane is more ambitious. "I've got the feeling that with all this going on we're going to see the end of Ken Bounds. It's got to go farther than that. We've got to rebuild the Parks Department."