Poll Results: West Towson Park Expansion
Over the past 2 days, we launched an effort to solicit feedback about how the neighborhood would like to use the West Towson Park expansion. We solicited our mailing list and Facebook followers to fill out a brief survey ranking different choices for use of the park expansion. This is all meant to infuse neighborhood input in the Baltimore County Department of Recreation and Parks public information process.
Methodology note: We asked neighbors to rank 9 choices and counted how often each was in the Top 3. This helps us evaluate preferences fairly, avoiding bias from simple ratings. By looking at top choices, we understand which options are most popular in the community. This approach also makes it easier to find compromise solutions that may be a top choice overall, but which may not be the top choice if we only counted 1st place rankings. Enough methodology, onto the results.
We received responses from 111 neighbors about how they’d like to see the West Towson Park expansion be used. The top responses are shown in the following chart:
The top choices of a ‘Picnic / Grilling Pavilion’ and ‘Dedicated Pickleball Courts’ both appeared as a top 3 choice for over half of the survey participants while ‘Street Soccer Facilities’ was a top 3 choice for slightly less than 50% of the survey respondents. A ‘Larger Playground / Age Appropriate Equipment’ was ranked as the 1st place choice disproportionately, but fell to 4th on the list when considering the number of times it appeared as a Top 3 choices. This points to a passionate, but relatively small contingent within the neighborhood wanting this. A ‘Dog Park’ rounded out the top 5.
It’s worth also noting that the rankings for ‘Green Space / Gardens’ followed a similar pattern to that of the neighbors who preferred a larger playground; it received a disproportionate number of top choice rankings relative to its position on the list.
Several neighbors provided additional perspective within the poll or directly. Here are some highlights:
Tree Preservation: our neighborhood tree stewards have invested in building the green canopy for the playground starting in the 90’s and continuing through the placement of 7 shade trees in the park last year. This group pointed to several things motivating their work including providing shade to children, filtering out air pollution, and making the outdoors more tolerable as the weather heats up.
Pickleball Noise: neighbors reached out about how noisy it is to live around the constant noise of noise of pickleballs hitting paddles. They hoped that future pickleball facilities would be placed outside of residential areas.
Pick up soccer: a group of soccer enthusiasts called out the opportunity to support soccer in the neighborhood. They shared that small soccer facilities play a crucial role in nurturing local soccer talent by making pick up games outside of organized programs easier for kids. As opposed to the larger facilities used by organized programs, these smaller facilities enable time ‘on the ball’ as is witnessed by the pick up games that break out when neighbors bring their personal goals to the park.
The good news is that many of these options are not mutually exclusive. The neighborhood’s feedback will be provide at the public meeting and all interested neighbors are encouraged to attend tonight June 11 from 6:30 to 8 p.m.
The WebEx details are:
Meeting number: 2317 202 5100
Password: DqrQB8h5tP8.
