NaperGardens

Thanks for your interest in this issue. I enjoyed speaking with you.

As you know, the garden plots are located in a part of the Caroline Martin Mitchell legacy properties. We share this site with a number of other groups, to include the Sportsmens’ park for shooting and the Von Oven Scout Reservation.

But three of the groups we share it with are growing: Edward Hospital, Central High School, and the Naperville Park District. There has been pressure for years due to their growth and need for additional space. As an example, Edward Hospital now has buildings all of the way from Washington to West Street. They are obviously strapped for parking.

Over the years we, as gardeners have known that the other groups have eyes on our site for their expansion. There was a move to locate a skate park on the site some years ago which was defeated, as an example.

To us, the site is key to our program. This was a commercial farm before it was turned into gardens. When I first gardened, we had a poor quality site on Plainfield Road. I dropped out of the program because the soil was very difficult to work. I joined again when they designated the West Street site for us.

This site is ideal. Primarily it is the fine, Illinois topsoil, three to four feet thick. It was professionally farmed and cultivated for many years prior to our movement there, improving it further. It is well drained. It is also centrally located.

We as gardeners know that there is no similar available piece of land in Naperville. The Park District has designated a site on Royce Road, near Bolingbrook. But this is just a park, not a commercial farm. And the distance is a real problem for our users, which gets back to the issue of seniors.

A lot of seniors have gardens in our plots. I cannot tell you what the percentage is, Cy. I was estimate that it is at least a third of all gardeners. For a lot of them the gardens are a social medium. They tend to spend hours on end at the plots, tilling them, watering them. I notice that around me the seniors seem to know one another as well as the no-senior gardeners. Some of my best friends at the plots are seniors. I have gotten a lot of gardening advice from them over the years.

The seniors are especially worried about moving the plots. My impression is that they tend to live in the central area of Naperville. None of the ones I know live in the far south. I have no data on this. But for the record, the Park District has told us that more than 50%of all gardeners live north of 75^th Street. I really believe that the percentage is higher for seniors.

I have been told by a number of serious gardening seniors that they will not follow the gardening program to Royce Road. I believe them. In the early part of the season we all spend hours on site at the plots, preparing the soil and planting crops. But as the season moves into the summer, our pattern is to visit daily for watering and weeding only. That means a lot of short visits to the plots. Same thing is true late in the season, when the crops are ready. We visit for fifteen minutes to pick vegetables and leave. That is easy at a convenient location. It would be very tough if the gardens were a long way off.

Another item in our minds is the safety of our current plots. We have very little problem with theft. Many of us even leave tools in the plots, not worried about losing them. Naperville has athletic facilities already at DuPage River Park. They have a high incidence of theft we are told. They also have a problem with people loitering on the property. Understand, this is immediately proximate to the Bolingbrook commercial area. This would be a problem for the gardeners.

What triggered the current debate was the decision to review the Caroline Martin Mitchell property use by the city. A group of “stakeholders” was appointed by the city to do this. It included the Park District, School District 203, the Von Oven Scout Reservation and the Sportsmen’s’ club.

Their first draft recommended that the garden plots be mostly converted to sports fields. They convened a meeting on June 20, 2008 to obtain public input. They did not notify the gardeners of this meeting. However, a group called the West Street Greenspace Coalition was engaged with the Park District on another subject (Hobson Ponds issue), learned of it and distributed literature at the garden plots a few days before the meeting. I attended.

The meeting had probably twenty five gardeners in attendance. I would estimate that fifteen gardeners spoke. I questioned the “stakeholder” appointments. Specifically, each stakeholder had an issue at stake, and each stakeholder’s issue was protected. The report recommended no change to the status of either the Sportsmen’s’ or the Scouts use of property. The report recommended considering our garden plots for expansion of Central High School’s athletic fields.

Not being stakeholders, the gardeners program was not protected. It was penciled in for destruction (most of the plots), giving it to the School District.

A lot of sophisticated questions were asked. What has testing shown about soil and drainage at DuPage River Park? Was there any pollution in the soil? How would the fields be used by the High School?

Here is what we learned:

·         No testing had been done at DuPage River Park. They were planning on doing that if the gardens were selected to move there, not before.

·         The fields would only be used for after-school activities, not for PE class activities. This meant that they would be used only a few hours each day during the school year, compared with the gardens, which are used all day long.

·         No analysis had been done on utilization of the fields was available to give us. That is, they had no data on how many fields a high school like Central should have by industry standards, how much utilization they now had per field, what the optimum utilization per field was etc. I am not saying that this does not exist. But when we asked for it, they had no answers.  On this, I have found numerous studies on the Internet conducted by communities facing the same decision Naperville faces. They measure the utilization of the fields by hours per week, also travel to the fields, scheduling proficiency, and determine if new fields are needed or not.

·         The methodology of the School District was to have dedicated fields by sport. One questioner asked why not use the soccer fields on West Street as extra fields for baseball and football practice during those seasons. Even professional teams share facilities. (I recall that the St. Louis football Cardinals and the St. Louis Baseball Cardinals shared Busch Stadium for many years. We would see the football team playing across the infield on TV). Naperville will not do this. The baseball fields are now idle as I pass West Street. They are not used for football practice.

·         The Cemetery has called back some practice fields from the Park District.

·         There is a new sport coming into Naperville, Lacrosse. They need dedicated fields for this sport. Right now they practice at Nike Park in North Naperville, where the facilities are sufficient. They just want to be closer to the school.

·         The gardeners were in the dark on all of this because they were not being notified of meetings or proposals being made.

Not spoken of in this meeting or in other meetings was the impact construction at Central High School will have on the entire area around the School. We now know that construction is slated for next spring, and that it will take up much of the available parking at the School. This creates a big problem for the School, which many of us suspect may be causing their immediate need for our garden plots, for use as parking during the construction time, sports fields later.

There was a critical meeting on September 11. It was not pre-announced to the gardeners as a meeting to discuss the garden plot issue. I telephoned the Park District on September 5 to see if our item was on the agenda. I got a return E-Mail the next day, Saturday. I learned that the garden plot was in fact on the agenda. I went to the garden plots most of Saturday and Sunday to inform the gardeners. This time of year there are few gardeners at the plots, but I rounded up enough people for us to have a presence at the meeting. We had about twenty gardeners and fielded eight speakers.

We covered the points I have mentioned above. The District Board members said nothing, and asked no questions. They then voted to keep the garden plot issue alive, and to give the School District charge for gathering community input on the issue.

This is a big problem for us. There are two parties contending for our plot site – the gardeners and the School District. The School District has been given control of gathering input from the community. We feel that there is no way the School District will recommend that the community wants to retain the gardening program as-is. They are very large and well-funded. They have probably a thousand employees to send to meetings to vote for their proposal. Add the pressure on students to win the parents’ vote and this puts the gardeners in a very bad position.

At the September 11 meeting we made a strong case that seniors have few options under the programs offered by the Park District. The garden program is wonderful for them. It gives them recreation, exercise, sunshine and fresh vegetables. It has become a social network for them.

There was absolutely no response to this, except that a letter to the editor at the Sun by a gardener produced a reaction from the Park District to the effect that there are many seniors programs besides gardening. But none of the programs they listed are active, exercising, outdoor programs like the gardening program.

This is a generational issue. We have a lot of seniors and a lot of families with young children in the gardening program. It is unique serving these groups. The teenagers at Central have a lot of programs. If we destroy the gardening program we do not get a great new program for the teenagers, but just a minimal expansion in an existing sports program. What are we teaching our children about community fairness and sharing? Why are the needs of the seniors, adults and young families seen as subservient to the needs of the children?

That is a synopsis of our issue, Cy. There is a lot of interesting commentary on our web site, Napergardens.com. Especially check out the “What Gardeners Say.”