My name is Peter Ray, and I’m running for Vashon Park District commissioner position 5.

I moved to the island in 1982, the year before the district was created. Over the years I have been a regular, if not frequent, user of some of the programs and facilities that the Vashon Park District has had to offer. In 2012 I became a regular attendee of the park district’s twice-monthly commissioners meetings in the hopes of trying to understand what was going on with the VES Fields construction project. In the three years I have been going to these meetings as an observer, very few of them have gone by without some new revelation emerging about the Vashon Elementary site fields. This summer was no different.

From the start I was skeptical of the fields’ sand-based structure, as it seemed that in the wet winter, dry summer climate we live in, this would drastically increase the amount of water needed to sustain the fields in summer months. Being built on sand — perhaps the most ironic of metaphors here — I was concerned mostly about how much water it would take to keep these fields alive. I recently asked maintenance supervisor Jason Acosta about VES water usage this year, to which he responded that the fields had consumed over 2 million gallons so far and that there was a cap imposed on VES water usage by the state Department of Ecology at just under 3 million gallons. According to the Carr report, the usable water budget for the entire island is about 98 million gallons a year. So, the VES fields are consuming at least 2, and up to 3 percent of the island’s water to grow grass on sand in a place where the existing play fields that were replaced by VES had previously had no irrigation system. While groomed grass fields are by definition not sustainable, until the VES situation is resolved on many levels, the recently revised park district goal to  “demonstrate our commitment to environmental and fiscal sustainability” will just be so much water, and words, running through sand.

I believe in the newly stated missions and goals of the park district. As the gift that keeps on taking, the VES Fields pose more than just fiscal challenges to achieving any goal of even the most basic level of sustainability for both the park district and the island. While the VES Fields have been cast in the monochromatic light of being just a fiscal hiccup that needs to be righted for the parks to be able to move forward, I believe that the VES project has created a wide spectrum of potential problems for the district and the island that are only now being recognized. As park commissioner, I will work to address those challenges, as well as take a much broader view toward future park’s decision making than the results of past choices regarding the VES process now represent.