Judy Robertson: The promise was clear in September of last year, and remains clear now: The green space that has been reclaimed by demolishing the Abel Holtz stadium shall remain green space.

Dear Neighborhood and Community Affairs Committee members:


By now you will have received various emails and letters from residents of the Flamingo Park Neighborhood, standing up for our Great Lawn in Flamingo Park and speaking out against expanding the proposed Tennis Center into what is now open, green space. Tomorrow, you will see many of the faces that go with those emails. For those new to the Commission, you may not have an appreciation of the enormous effort leading up to the Commission's approval last September of the Master Plan "L", which finalized the footprint of the tennis center to include a maximum of 17 tennis courts. You won't have a memory of the hundreds of people who spoke before the Commission and its sub-committees over a decade, who took time off from work to share their concerns with City Boards, who attended the design charrettes going all the way back to 1997, who walked the Park's perimeters with planners and park staff, and who volunteered their time to sit on the evaluation committee to select the best design firm for the job.

I have a very clear memory of all that, as do many of my neighbors, colleagues, and friends. The Commission runs the grave risk of negating all that effort and alienating a huge portion of our community if it doesn't keep its promise on this issue. The promise was clear in September of last year, and remains clear now: The green space that has been reclaimed by demolishing the Abel Holtz stadium shall remain green space.

Imagine, if you will, approaching the good residents of South Pointe, and proposing that they relinquish a portion of their beautiful new, open, green, South Pointe Park, just so that a contentious disagreement among tennis players over preferred playing surface could be resolved. Would the residents of South Pointe sit quietly by and accept the City's excuse of, 'we looked for a couple of months and couldn't find anywhere else to put them, and this would settle the argument'?

Unacceptable! The burden of creating a compromise between tennis players is squarely on the City, not on our Neighborhood at large. Go back to the approved plan, look at the language the City used in guiding the planners it hired, wherein it MANDATES the restoration and creation of green space in our new Park. We worked extremely hard to bring this plan to fruition, and be assured we will work even harder to keep it.

Judy Robertson,  Flamingo Park Neighborhood Association