Managed by managers, glad to see him go
This is a response to “Seattle parks chief to resign May 10” [NWTuesday, April 27].
I am not a fan of Parks Superintendent Tim Gallagher and I am happy to see him go.
While he was away on various park expeditions, he left his team of managers to bungle a restoration site on an unstable slope above a sensitive wetland near my home in the northeast section of Ravenna Park.
My husband and I tried on repeated occasions to reach Gallagher and arrange a meeting with officials to discuss this mutual concern. After being ignored, I learned the best way to get the park managers’ attention: block their enormous dump truck from dropping a load of fill in their ill-fated and negligent attempt to restore an unstable slope.
That worked briefly, until mid-April, when they next gave us short notice to remove a retaining wall at the site — one even the Department of Planning and Development would have red- tagged.
To get their attention again, we had to light up the phone lines at Mayor Mike McGinn’s office to ask their assistance for a stay. Not one person was in the office on that Monday afternoon to take our phone calls.
While Gallagher was in Australia discussing the health of our parks, he failed to see they were already on life support and his staff was all on furlough at home. This is a pathetic failure of leadership and gives me no reassurance we could expect them to prevent a failure of the steep slope next to our home.
— Jennifer Kennard, Seattle