Kalapuya History and Debate on Baseball in SCAN this Week

This week SCAN has two real items of interest. The first is a book talk on Wednesday the 12th with Dr. David Lewis on his Tribal Histories of the Willamette Valley, published last fall.

The presentation will keynote SCAN's annual meeting. Though the City's recurring calendar item says the meeting will be at South High like normal monthly meetings, the agenda itself says Pringle Community Hall, just west of the Hospital. That's been the customary spot for the annual meeting over the years and the calendar item is almost certainly wrong.

The topic is relevant!

Not harmful to Oaks and Camas

The other item of interest is at the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board on Thursday the 13th, an updated and revised agreement on the proposed baseball improvements at Bush Park.

One of the lead questions has been "What about the Oaks and Camas?"

The Staff Report on the revised agreement says 

Staff have determined that the proposed baseball stadium improvements will not harm the existing Oregon white oaks and camas communities within the park.

Further in the packet, a set of responses from Willamette University (oddly, not on letterhead or signed or anything more formally marked) says

An extraordinary measure of this project is the significant reduction of irrigation thanks to installing synthetic turf. The CLMP lists the leading threat to the oak trees as root rot caused by excessive irrigation. The elimination of irrigation at the ballpark will significantly help the oak savannahs directly east and south of the ballpark. According to Willamette’s athletic complex manager, the current ballpark grass alone needs over 1,000,000 gallons of water a summer and none of that would be necessary with artificial turf.

And

Luke Emamuel with The Salem Baseball Club reached out to both the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians in late 2022 regarding this project and have continued to provide updates. Both the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde have responded in support.

But the packet, as of this morning anyway, contains no letter of support from either tribal agency. This second-hand report may deserve more verification.

Even with support, it would be good to know more about the tribal understandings of current activity here by the Oaks and Camas. One of the criticisms here of the Cultural Landscape Management Plan was that it didn't actually talk much about culture and any current cultural meanings of the landscape. 

In response a few years ago, a person cited another instance of a Cultural Landscape Plan to explain the genre and form:

For example, the cultural landscape report on the Alcatraz Prison gardens does not explore American penal history or Alcatraz's role in that history. Instead, it describes landscape features such as location of plantings beds, plant material, hardscape material and the various groups of people who created and interacted with those features (prisoners, guards, family of staff), then proposes a plan of restoration and management.

So perhaps criticizing the Bush Park Cultural Landscape Management Plan for spending little time and attention on culture is to criticize it for something it does not aim to do, but over and over in public comment people invoke more general ideas of "culture" and as the plan goes out into the public, it is very obviously understood with a more general idea of culture. 

We should talk more about the cultural meaning encoded by and created in the park! Look at the way the return of the Soap Box Derby was received the other day. That's not just about "planting beds, plant material, [and] hardscape material." That's a real cultural event.

"Guiding" vs "regulatory" document

Another misunderstanding with the document is that a lot of people thought it was what the Staff Report says it is not, a "regulatory" document. The Staff Report says "strict adherence to the plan is not critical" and that it is instead a "guiding document."

You may recall a person submitted comment using the word "prohibit":

the proposed expansion of the stadium footprint is inconsistent with both the letter and the spirit of the CLMP [cultural landscape management plan]....In fact, this is precisely the sort of development that the CLMP was intended to prohibit. [italics added]

We see this over and over with City documents, like Bike and Walk Salem and updates to the Transportation System Plan. Unless values from planning documents are instantiated in Salem Revised Code, they are too often merely aspirational. 

So it will be interesting to see if any effective opposition is mounted. At the April meeting a SCAN board member seemed to threaten "possible LUBA appeals and appeals to the Oregon Court of Appeals."

More positively, there are what appear to be some neat instances of new tech proposed!

Modern lighting for darker skies

New modern lighting for the ballpark offers much darker skies and less light spill.

Multiple small speakers rather than big PA

A distributed approach to the PA system with many small speakers instead of fewer large speakers appears to offer reduced sound volumes and spillover.

Combined with what is really a pretty small chunk of new "encroachment" into City property, it really doesn't seem like the proposed changes are a very disruptive intervention and set of modifications.

New encroachment areas are small

More life in the park would be great, and hopefully the plan can move forward.

Previously on the Landscape Plan:

• "Power and Wealth at Bush Park and Deepwood: A Cultural Landscape Plan at the HLC" (2020)
  
• "Bush Park Cultural Landscape Plan out in Draft for Review" (2021)
  
• "City Council, July 26th - Bush Park Plan seems Rushed" (2021)
  
• Earlier this year, on the Memorandum of Understanding, "City Council, January 22nd - Urban Renewal, Climate, Baseball"
  
• A brief note on SPRAB and a newspaper article, "Meeting Bits: Parks & Rec, SCAN, Highland"
• A longer note on SPRAB, "Parks & Rec Board to talk Baseball and More"
  

And some history of baseball in the neighborhood:

• On baseball in the neighborhood, "Salemites Saw Negro League Star and Hall of Famer Bullet Rogan in 1921 at Long-gone Oxford Park" (2021)
• "At Oxford Park site Ericksons Supermarket building now home to Fitts Seafood and Santiam Wine" (2021)

Addendum

Opposition remains strong by some. 

More comment has been published today, and a letter signed by 79 residents from around the city, not just neighbors of the park, hits exclusionary themes in historic preservation:

We ask you to advise Council that we are strongly opposed to moving forward on the Staff Recommendation, which facilitates a commercial for-profit business that would monopolize the park and on site parking resources during the summer months. This business would change the identity of the Bush’s Pasture Park; cause a major disruption of the chosen preferences and historical and recreational use patterns; and undermine the heritage of the area, and may violate the grant and conveyances of the land involved.

We are opposed to converting the legacy lands of the Bush Family, the park and parking lots, into a de facto summer baseball league facility for, in essence, a commercial for-profit operation which would provide revenue generation for Willamette University and a private corporate entrepreneur.

This conversion to commercial use would be incompatible and inconsistent with the Bush’s Pasture Park and Deepwood Estates Cultural Landscape Management Plan (CLMP), adopted by the City Council in 2021. It would be in violation of existing zoning SRC 540 and SRC 542. It would be in contradiction to the explicit purpose and intent of the Gaiety Hill/Bush’s Pasture Park National Historic District and would be a betrayal of the intent of the Bush Trust to have a “natural park in the heart of a city. The retention of the property for this purpose alone is important…” (Stuart Bush 1960; p.1 CLMP) [slightly edited to remove some internal citations]