After hearing a resident complain about noise and light–a resident familiar to every council member who’s served since 2009–Palm Coast City Council member Charles Gambaro Tuesday evening got the presentation he requested on Ralph Carter Park. It did not go as he expected. The park’s popularity is too broad, the complaints about it too finite, to justify dimming the park’s operations in response to a handful of complaints, if that.
Gambaro requested the discussion to take on an issue that every council has grappled with since 2009, when the park opened: the park’s noise and light pollution on a few–very few, but shrilly vocal–nearby homeowners.
“I think there needs to be some consistency in the lighting based on the time frames that we set, and that’s a management issue,” Gambaro said. He wants quality of life assurances applied uniformly in the city, whether it’s noise or light.
The lights shining into residents’ properties “is not OK,” he said. “We can’t have a double standard and quality of life issues throughout the city.” He is also concerned about the definition of a neighborhood park “treated like a sports complex.” (In fact, the Indian Trails Sports Complex and Ralph Carter Park are zoned the same way, City Attorney Marcus Duffy said.)
Council member Theresa Pontieri, who has championed local youth sports and the city’s facilities enabling them, responded forcefully. The noise ordinance doesn’t apply, because the homeowners who are complaining are beyond the applicable limit, she said.
“I don’t want to make it seem like I don’t care about the residents around this park. I do. But there are things that can be done, such as blackout curtains and stuff like that to help with the light pollution,” Pontieri said, making a difference between the issues around Ralph Carter Park and the airport, which Gambaro also cited. Around the airport, residents can’t shield their homes from the noise, Pontieri said. “We’re talking about quality of life. But what about the quality of life of all of our families and all of our kids that play at that park?”
Pontieri, addressing Marion Petruzzi specifically–Petruzzi has been the one homeowner who’s led the longest battle against light and noise from the park–said she didn’t want to minimize her complaints. “But it is our job to govern for the people that are the most people that we can benefit as possible,” Pontieri said. “We’re never going to make everybody happy. That is an impossible, frivolous endeavor. We have to endeavor to do what’s best for the community as a whole.”
To Council member Ty Miller, it’s “fairly cut and dry.,” He cited the huge number of children using the park, as well as parents, as opposed to “some inconvenience” from homeowners. The city, he said, has been trying to address issues for years. “We can’t just keep throwing money at this in an attempt to mitigate it, when it extremely benefits our families and our youth sports,” Miller said. “I just don’t see any way how we can decrease that resource even more when we’re in a situation where we don’t have enough as it is. So I feel like there’d just have to be a super high threshold for me to even consider changes.”
With one exception, the several people who addressed the council, most of them users of the park through leagues, all spoke of the park as essential to their activities. One parent credited Mad Dogs Flag Football for saving her son’s life.
Ryan Smith, an owner at Flagler Dental, said: “I see a lot of these kids at my practice. Nobody likes coming to the dentist. But when we talk about Mad Dogs, the kids’ faces light up. The parents’ faces light up. This is an asset to our community, and it’s a shame that we’re even having this conversation. As a business owner, this drives business. This drives families to come here. That’s what we want, and that we’re having this conversation, like I said, it’s just a shame. So don’t take it out on the kids.”
There was a lot of applause from a full chamber as others spoke likewise.
James Hirst, the city’s parks and recreation director, has given that presentation before, as have his predecessors. Over time, he’s tweaked it to include facts relevant to the moment, such as research findings that equitable youth sports opportunities are of huge importance to families and to children for all sorts of reasons–improving physical fitness, developing teamwork and motor skills, developing friendships.
Ralph Carter Park has been one of the city’s major recreation successes, affording thousands of children and adolescents ample, safe and supervised space for team sports every year. It’s been so successful that the city has had to cap new members to the city’s sports alliance. As it is, an amalgam of soccer groups has some 830 participants, Palm Coast Little League has over 400, Mad Dogs Flag Football has 400.
The park’s large grounds have been maintained by the city. Its flood-lit fields have provided extra space and time for leagues that can’t be fit in at the Indian Trails Sports Complex. For thousands of others, younger or older, the park is a place for free play and relaxation. The role it plays as a community hub and pride point for the R Section is not minor, either.
But since its opening in 2009 the park has also been a sore point for a few–very few–of its neighbors, homeowners whose properties rim the north end of the park, where the noises of competition and the natural yelps of children can be heard, as the light from tall light poles can be seen. Year after year, those homeowners have caught the attention of council members, especially when there’s turnover on the council, and have attempted to limit the use of lights or restrain the amount of competitive play that takes place at the park.
For the city, the trade-off has not been fair to pursue beyond several measures the parks and recreation department has taken to manage quality of life issues, from light shields to shorter hours when lights are used to scheduling tactics. There’s also a limit to how much light should be shielded: it’s a safety issue if dark spots result on the field. (Retrofitting field lights with LED would cost $370,000.)
In the end, the park is used by too many people, especially young people, for too much benefit. Hampering the activities of thousands to placate the complaints of less than a dozen people has not seemed to be a fair deal.
Less than a dozen is likely an exaggeration. “From my perspective, there’s one person,” Miller said, accurately alluding to Petruzzi. Petruzzi has often referred to others, but they have rarely materialized, and if so, not for long. “She sends emails saying that she’s representing the entire our section, and I don’t find that to be credible,” Miller said. “It’s difficult for me to put weight behind something that’s said by one person where it affects potentially 1000s of families.” ((See: “More Sound and Fury Than Broad Problems as 3 Residents Complain to City of Ralph Carter Park’s Popularity.”)
Mayor Mike Norris also referred to a history of efforts to ensure safety in and around the park with lights, though he overstated the case when he referred to “gang activity” there. There never was gang activity there. (There were, around 2010, some white people who dog-whistled about other people as “undesirables.”) Norris said he lives a distance from the Indian Trails complex and contends with light and noise.
Lights are controlled only by city staff. The lights can be turned off remotely, and that at times happens when players leave early and contact city staff. But teams don’t have access to the light switches. Norris thinks they should.
That will be considered. The height of the light poles will be measured. Certain software options will be studied. But beyond that, the discussion ended just before where it had started: with Ralph Carter Park as a prized city asset, doing what it is intended to do. It is not about to see substantial changes.
Gambaro did not want to leave the wrong impression about his support for the park. “My whole life has been a team sport, and I think it’s important, but I just also think we need to do what we can to address resident concerns,” Gambaro said. “If there’s a way to do it, great. If there’s not, I understand. But no one here is arguing about taking away team sports. We’re not doing that. I’m not doing that. I brought this discussion up so we can have a conversation.”
