The track stays, pickleball is moving, and senior ball players are getting a field.
After four rounds of public feedback, months of staff and stakeholder workshops, hundreds of survey responses and countless trips back to the drawing board, Salt Spring’s Local Community Commission (LCC) unanimously approved the draft Portlock Park Site Master Plan, concurrently revising the existing Rainbow Recreation Centre Site Master Plan and outlining the basic configuration for both properties going into the future.
Development of a master plan for Portlock Park began as a priority with the island’s Parks and Recreation Strategic Plan back in 2019. The current plan relocates some park amenities from Portlock to the Rainbow Recreation Centre site to allow more playing fields –– most notably a senior-sized baseball field for youth at Portlock.
Among those moves came a shift for pickleball from Portlock Park to the Rainbow Road site, with dedicated courts for the sport planned at the latter. Commissioners heard 11th-hour concerns from members of the public worried about light and noise, as pickleball has a storied history elsewhere in recent years of causing neighbourhood conflicts.
It was indeed pickleball enthusiasts themselves who broached the topic, worried that noise complaints could tarnish the growing sport’s standing.
But the LCC agreed that those concerns could be mitigated; acting senior manager Dan Ovington said there was an engineered barrier material available, as well as other construction techniques to mitigate noise –– ones that didn’t necessarily require something as drastic as digging the courts below grade. Shifting the pickleball courts to Rainbow was the only way to “squeeze in” everything else between the two properties, he added, pointing particularly to the playing fields and oval track.
“And it allows them to have six courts,” said Ovington. “They had four courts in the last revision, and the feedback I received was that [the pickleball players] were not supportive of four.”
LCC member Brian Webster thanked staff for the work they had put in to find compromise, and noted the new master plan “significantly” upgraded outdoor sport activity on Salt Spring for a wide range of user groups.
“There’s a point at which we either make decisions knowing that not everyone will be 100 per cent satisfied –– and not every question can be fully answered today –– or we just have an endless consultation process going on for years and years,” said Webster. “I think staff have done a pretty good job; they came back with a solution that made it work.”
Commissioners agreed the noise and light concerns were legitimate, and that there was more work to be done –– but that would come at the next stage.
“Concerns about how implementation is going to be sensitive to the needs of both the user groups and the neighbours, that is all going to be part of the ongoing process,” said Webster.