Survey: Esprit Park Renovation
On Thursday, December 3rd, over 80 people participated in a 90-minute online meeting to express their ideas and concerns on future plans for Esprit Park. Many thanks to those who took the time and made the effort to raise their voices on this beloved 1.8 acre meadow so important to the Dogpatch community.
That was the first step. Now comes the second. Take a few minutes to fill out the Esprit Park Survey. The results of this survey are crucial to how the park will evolve and who it will serve. This may be your final chance to make your views known and ensure that the park truly reflects the vision of the Dogpatch residents who use it. Please take the survey now. It is open until Dec. 28.
Happy Holidays!
p.s. You can see the park designs here.
ABOUT THE SURVEY
The survey is unfortunately written in a biased way. We have several members of our team with extensive market research backgrounds and have all come to the same conclusion that this survey is written in a way to influence the public into answering it in the way Rec & Park wants.
Since day 1, Rec & Park has been pushing for artificial turf in the Dog Play Area (DPA) and used a lot of misleading data points to attempt to prove their point. Through our work with Supervisor Walton, we were able to get multiple full-grass Esprit Park options on the survey. However, Rec & Park is continuing to push their preferential language. We, and many others, have reached out to Rec & Park to give them a chance to amend their survey, but have received no actionable response. Which leads us to: Time is ticking and with no guarantee of a good faith survey update, we request that everyone read the following information before taking the survey:
Q.8 - Family Meadow
A dog free meadow is unprecedented in all of San Francisco. We do not want Esprit Park to be the guinea pig for this policy.
Families want no dogs - False
We take issue with the no dog “family area” that Rec & Park has proposed. Families come in all shapes and sizes, and this antiquated notion of family is beneath any city agency. This isn’t priority boarding for a Southwest flight. This image represents what we believe families look like in SF.
All families with children want no dogs - False
Many families with children have dogs as part of their family. In fact, many families without dogs love and enjoy seeing the dogs running in the park. Not all families want a dog-free area in Esprit.
Dog play areas are anti-people - False
People like to recreate with their dogs in safe open spaces. Dogs don’t walk to the parks by themselves, and they don’t play in parks by themselves. Yet many of the dog play areas in D10 are in places where humans don’t want to go - under a freeway, or in a small space covered with smelly artificial turf. These places are anti-people. Next time you see a dog play area, ask yourself whether you would want to go in there.
Q.9 - Artificial Turf
Rec & Park sets up this question by only providing misleading statements about artificial turf and failing to provide any positives about natural grass. In the community meeting, they used Upper Douglass Park and Lafayette Park DPA’s as examples, both of which are at the bottom of a hill. Esprit Park is nothing like these parks.
Esprit Park will be closed all winter - False
Only 2 of the 26 grass dog play areas in the city are closed all winter, and both are heavily used by commercial walkers bringing up to 6 dogs each, twice a day. The rest are closed only for sporadic maintenance as needed. Alamo, Duboce, and Dolores DPAs are not closed all winter.
Artificial turf has no consequences - False
Artificial turf replaces pollution-cleansing animal habitat with a specialty petroleum product that is rarely recycled. It requires chemicals for cleanliness and has been found to be a source of micro plastics which drain into the ocean.
Artificial turf will be cleaned daily - False
Rec & Park routinely cleans their artificial turf play areas once a week. They do not clean it every day nor does the Esprit Park budget allow for complex self-cleaning mechanisms. One of their newest artificial turf DPAs at Walter Haas is only cleaned once a week.
Q. 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 - Park Options
The way these questions are ordered and worded allows Rec & Park to manipulate the results afterwards. Rather than randomizing the options to reduce order bias, they have presented them in the order they would like you to respond.
There is no question allowing you to rank the options or definitively pick one.
In order to provide the most easily analyzed data set, you must select “Supports Very Well” or “Supports Well” ONLY on the ones you want. So, in this case, you might put “Does Not Support” for U, V, W and put “Supports Very Well” in X, Y, Z.
Only voting using the extremes of the scale will guarantee that your preference is analyzed correctly.
