Parks Report Card
Trash, rodent holes, graffiti and broken water fountain knock down park’s grade to lowest given yet while city officials talk solutions
Our summer series evaluating the city's shared green spaces continues. This week, we review kid-friendly facilities and others where trash and wees are clear eyesores
Angela Arellano and her young daughter are regulars at Franklin E. Miles Park, visiting the playground at the nearly 30-acre park near Camino Carlos Rey and Siringo Road in south-central Santa Fe several times a week.
Arellano, 36, who lives in the neighborhood, said she enjoys everything about the park except one thing: its appearance.
“It’s dirty,” Arellano said Thursday as her daughter asked for a push on a swing.
“If I see garbage as she’s playing, I’ll pick it up. But there’s a lot,” she said. “Sometimes the trash is overflowing.” It’s not just trash. While litter is scattered throughout the park, from empty liquor bottles and food wrappers to condoms and dirty clothes, the park is also being overrun by weeds, according to an evaluation by The New Mexican, which is examining the condition of Santa Fe’s public parks as part of an ongoing Parks Report Card series. The newspaper initially gave Franklin Miles Park a B-minus in the report card, but upon further review and closer inspection, the newspaper downgraded it to a D-plus.
The report card has captured the attention of some city officials. At Wednesday’s City Council meeting, Councilor Joseph Maestas asked City Manager Brian Snyder whether City Hall planned to respond to the newspaper’s in-depth story on the condition of Santa Fe’s public parks.
“I know our employees are doing a great job, but anytime somebody goes out there and does some kind of an evaluation and assesses a grade
to any of our city facilities, me as a councilor, obviously, I sit up and take interest,” he said.
Snyder said he wasn’t sure whether the city planned to issue a formal response but that the newspaper’s series was valuable.
The city is “definitely using it as a learning tool and working with staff to come up with a plan to address some of the concerns,” Snyder said.
Other problems uncovered at Franklin Miles Park include patchy, dead and overgrown grass, goathead seeds creeping into baseball fields, inoperable water fountains and graffiti. Last year, some of the baseball fields at the park were riddled with dirt mounds as a result of an infestation of pocket gophers. The city has made considerable progress in tackling the problem by killing the rodents with traps this year, but the scars from the pocket gophers’ digging remain in the ground.
For all its problems, the park’s well-kept playground areas and structures are bright spots that continue to make it an attractive destination for families with children.
Longtime radio personality Richard Eeds, who also lives in the neighborhood, said Franklin Miles Park is in terrible shape.
“I don’t know who Franklin Miles was, but if I was Franklin, I wouldn’t be happy having my name attached to this park,” Eeds said. (For the record, the park’s namesake is a retired major general who led the New Mexico National Guard. Miles died at age 93 in December 2016.)
Eeds has been ranting recently on the airwaves about the poor condition of the city’s parks, including during interviews with Mayor Javier Gonzales and at least two city councilors.
“I feel like the whole city has been let down by all of whatever you want to call the leaders of Santa Fe,” he said. “I don’t get the overall philosophy of just letting the parks go to crap and say, ‘We don’t have money. We don’t have manpower. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ ”
City Councilor Ron Trujillo, whose district includes the park, said Franklin Miles has deteriorated in recent years.
“There are sections of that turf that have completely died out and have just become weeds, or there’s nothing growing there at all,” he said.
Trujillo, who has been in office a dozen years and is running for mayor next year, said he always contacts city employees, including those in the Parks and Recreation Department, when problems at the park come to his attention. Lately, he said, he’s been receiving reports from constituents that homeless people are sleeping under the trees and in the dugouts, some of which smell like urine.
“People are defecating in the dugouts,” he said. “These are the things that we’re finding.”
Trujillo said he suspects part of the problem is that city government has changed its priorities.
“We need to go back to basics,” he said. “All these top-flight initiatives — soda taxes, Verde Funds, banning plastic bags, banning all these things — let’s stick to what the city is supposed to be doing. Taking care of the entire city. All the streets, the roads, the parks, public safety. Those are within the purview of the city to be doing.”
Gonzales, who spearheaded an unsuccessful tax on sugary beverages to fund preschool programs and started the so-called Verde Fund to combat climate change and reduce poverty, fired back at Trujillo on Friday.
“Ronnie’s running for mayor, so I get why he’s attacking the city,” Gonzales said. “What’s strange is the former chairman and longtime member of the committee in charge of infrastructure ducking accountability for streets and parks he allowed to fall apart. I came in three years ago to a parks bond mess, a $15 million deficit and $240 million in infrastructure needs that had been ignored — all on his watch.”
Gonzales said his administration tackled those problems head-on by working together, freeing up millions of dollars along the way to invest in roads and parks.
“The public is tired of fingerpointing, shrugging shoulders and denying responsibility,” he said. “They want accountability, and they want results. That’s my priority.”
City Councilor Mike Harris, who also represents District 4, said park users could help address the litter problems at Franklin Miles Park by picking up their own trash.
“In addition to real diligence on the part of staff, behavior modification needs to occur, as well, because it’s not staff throwing the litter,” he said.
Bernadette Alejandro said she often takes her three grandsons, ages 5, 8 and 10, to the Franklin Miles Park skate park, which is covered in graffiti. Alejandro, who gave the park an overall C grade, said some of the graffiti is particularly nasty, and she wishes the city would paint it over once in a while.
“As far as, like, the weeds and graffiti, I think they could do a better job,” she said. “But I also understand they have limited resources.”
City spokesman Matt Ross said the Parks Division cleans Franklin Miles Park daily.
“That’s their first stop every morning, and they hit it every single morning Monday through Friday,” he said. Yet some of the trash saw appeared to be there for a considerable period.
When asked to explain why there was so much trash in the park if it’s cleaned daily during the workweek, Ross said the park “sees a high level of usage all day and all afternoon and into the evening.”
“If the crews are hitting the park in the morning and then it’s getting used all day, then it’s going to have some trash and litter in it until they get back to it,” he said. “They’d love to be able to get back to it twice a day or more, but there’s not enough manpower for that.”
Ross said the city would tackle the overgrown weeds, some of which are at least 3 feet tall.
“Thanks for letting us know about it,” he said, adding that the city budgeted $200,000 this year to remove weeds from city traffic medians and parks.
“We’ll get a crew out there to fix it as quickly as possible.”
John F. Griego, District 1
Size: 0.92 acres Grade: B
One of many parks tucked along the Santa Fe River Trail, John F. Griego Park isn’t much more than a small lawn, a half-sized basketball court and a play structure.
The park’s exterior is well maintained. Grass was trim on the day The New Mexican stopped by, and there were very few weeds around the sidewalks. The wide lawn had large patches of yellowed grass, but it was thick underfoot and mostly green. A few shade trees abut one side of the field, and one recent afternoon, Amy Anderson and her friend spread out blankets in the shade there, chatting, while their children played on the modern and well-kept play structure.
Despite multiple shade structures in the playground area, the equipment has little coverage from the hot sun.
Kids prefer the monumental slide at Ragle Park over the few twisty slides and tubes in this play area, the women said. But they prefer the size of Griego. They can spread out and chat, while keeping an eye on the kids, who played far enough away that both adults and youth could enjoy some privacy.
“What I really appreciate is that Santa Fe does have a lot of smaller parks in the neighborhoods,” Anderson said. Pretty much anywhere she runs errands, she can take her kid to a park. “I’m sure it’s a lot of work to upkeep them,” she said, “but I think it’s really great for all of the neighborhoods.”
Water access is a feature of John F. Griego that not many parks offer. On a hot summer day, the women could park at the playground and take their kids down for a splash in the Santa Fe River.
Still, the park wasn’t quite pristine. A small basketball court had a very uneven surface, a worn hoop and weeds growing in the cracks. Graffiti was minimal but present on one of the park’s picnic tables. And on the back of the park’s namesake, a black memorial wall dedicated to Vietnam veterans, the white, spray-painted letters “ODC” stood out in bright contrast.
According to one New Mexican reporter who lives near the park, the graffiti letters have been there for at least a few months.
Gregory Lopez, District 1
Size: 1.19 acres Grade: C
On a hot, slightly breezy, sunny day, José Lujan and his family flew kites above the large, grassy expanse of Gregory Lopez Park. Lujan helped his twin 5-year-olds learn to let out the string and catch the wind, and at times his kids and nephews and nieces all had their kites in the air together, the colorful faces of princesses, Ninja Turtles and Minions animating the blue sky.
Then the wind would die, and his youngest kids would run over to the sun-drenched but newish small playground.
“We go to a lot of parks,” said Lujan, who watches his own kids, as well as nieces and nephews, during the summer when he’s not working his retail job. “We’ve been to nearly every park in the city with how active they are.”
Gregory Lopez is a favorite because it’s nearby and access is easy. A green lawn that makes up almost the entire park is dense and pleasant underfoot, yet marred with some patches of yellow and thin in areas where the brown of dirt shows through.
The simple playground is new, if sun-drenched, and large weeds grow in the woodchips. The park has a few trees that cast circles of shade over the grassy area, but neither the picnic tables nor the playground have any cover from the midday sun. One old, worn wooden bench looks eager to stick splinters in uncomfortable places.
Lujan thinks the overall quality of Santa Fe’s parks has improved during the nearly two decades he’s used them to entertain his kids.
“A lot of times, when I took my kids to the park, we would find trash or — God forbid — needles,” Lujan said. “There are one or two that are still like that, but they seem to be better taken care of now.”
His mother, Debbie Lujan, said she thinks the city’s parks are mostly nice. She’s been visiting them for over 60 years.
“Some of them could do with a little better maintaining,” she said. “But for the most part, I can’t complain too much.”
Las Acequias Park, District 3
Size: 6.59 acres Grade: B
Las Acequias Park is a large, green, shady and well-maintained community gathering place off Calle Atajo and Rufina Street.
A winding network of walking paths snakes through the grassy ground of the park, connecting playgrounds, a basketball court and eating areas. Near the parking lot, a nearly pristine basketball court beckons hoop fanatics, marred only by graffiti on the bottom of a light pole.
The park boasts not one, but two play structures with winding slides and swing sets. A permanent play structure shades picnic tables, and this park is one of few evaluated by The New Mexican that has multiple recycling bins. They’re clearly being used, given that there was no trash in the 6-acre grassy expanse.
The grass itself is somewhat thin but impressively green throughout the large park. Trees big and small shade spots of grass and benches along the walking paths, but leave the two playsets widely exposed to the sun.