Ken McGary here, author of the original editorial that seems to have stirred everyone up here. I've been on the road the last few days but am now following up on email and would like to respond to some of the points made in this thread.
First, for all of you who have made personal attacks and spun out wildly stereotypical rants about who I am and what I'm about, I have two things to say...
1. Wildly entertaining!
2. You have no clue.
Now for all of you who have responded to the actual issues, and have admitted that even a few of the points made in my editorial might have some basis in fact, I salute you. You are the future of your sport.
Yes, tosco who posted in this thread earlier is a good friend and helpfully passed on the full editorial I had sent to Half Moon Bay Review since I was traveling and couldn't get around to it myself. I do not live in Half Moon Bay, although I do make it down from time to time for a visit to Fitzgerald Marine Reserve and some of the other incredible natural attractions in the area. Someone passed the original editorial and article along to our Save McLaren Park coordinating committee, and since both were fairly one-sided towards the DG case, there was a general consensus that "someone ought to write a letter to the editor to present another view", so I did. Ultimately it is a decision for those who live there, but they should be aware of both sides of the issue and now they are.
Now to a few specific issues:
Ok, I'll let the nut and whack job comments pass as the rest of this post is right on. Several commenters here have said things like "here in Cedar Rapids we have a hundred DG courses and everything is fine". Well, that's great, but coastal California's environment is a very different beast. Right now I'm in rural Kentucky and there is room for a thousand disc golf courses in this one county without significantly affecting overall plant or animal life. Come on down and knock yourself out!
Conversely, McLaren Park is in the second most population-dense city in the US. Only four percent of our natural areas remain, and they must be shared with almost a million residents. Of course land use decisions are incredibly contentious -- it's the price of living in the Big City. Is San Francisco unique in this aspect? Of course not. In fact there are many other urban areas that have zero disc golf courses within the city limits. I don't have my spreadsheet handy but from memory, there no DG courses on public lands in Chicago, Atlanta, Washington DC, nor any of the boroughs of NYC, for starters. Even sprawling, freeway-bound LA has only one, and laid-back San Diego has only one pay-to-play course. In the surrounding less-crowded burbs? That's another story. So as others have noted, these issues are primarily local and should be decided by local residents.
However, for local residents to make sound decisions about these issues, they must be well informed about all sides, and in most cases they are not. Unfortunately, a common approach taken by those wanting a new DG course is to come in under the radar, negotiate with the "rec" part of the local rec/park department, and establish "facts on the ground" before a full public airing of the issues has even been hinted at. This is exactly what happened in SF, and in many other cases we've heard about around the country. You can learn more about our experiences here in McLaren Park by review this
complete DG timeline.
At the same time, I think there are appropriate places for DG courses in crowded urban areas, primarily on a shared basis with ball golf courses, as I stated at the end of
my full editorial. Golf is in a slow, steady decline -- SF, for example, has six municipal courses, all of which are losing the city's coffers million of dollars each year, and it's only getting worse. And of course we need soccer fields and so on as well, but we already have lots of those. In fact more than half of McLaren Park is already filled with tennis courts and swimming pools and soccer fields and so on. The remaining relatively undeveloped natural areas are our last little bits of wildness (notice I did not say wilderness) and many of us are compelled to protect them vociferously. SFRPD did a survey in 2004 and by far the highest need as requested by residents is open space to go hiking, running, and dog-walking -- among all the other activities surveyed (tennis/baseball/soccer/etc) DG did not even rate a mention.
And yes it is true that disc golf gets folks outdoors, but unlike all the other activities we support in our park's remaining natural areas, it is impossible to play disc golf while staying on the trail. So, how is it "green" and "healthy" to get kids and families out to enjoy nature while simultaneously diminishing it? I have two young girls that I take to McLaren every time I get the chance and it is more than enough for them to climb a tree or walk the dog or take a stick and dig for bugs or watch the hawks and other birds soaring above. That's what I am fighting to preserve. And that's what the dozen or so folks on our Coordinating Committee and the thousands of folks who signed our petition and the hundreds of folks who read our newsletters and come to
our park events are also dedicated to protecting. When those few acres are gone, there isn't any more.
Thanks for reading,
Ken
