Two Silver Spring residents stared down a bulldozer on Wednesday to lay their claim to a little patch of green space. For five years, Carole Barth, Roxanne Mirabal and more than 300 of their neighbors have fought to keep North Four Corners Park, six acres between University Boulevard and Southwood Avenue, a meadow.
But last week, the Montgomery County Park Department approved $5.5 million for a new athletic complex. The meadow is anchored by a 175-year-old walnut tree; The new park would be anchored by a soccer field.
Officials say that when they came Wednesday for routine maintenance, the two women were there to stop them, claiming that crews were laying the groundwork for the controversial project. Not so, officials said.
“This is one of the department’s winter projects — we’ve been planning it since the fall,” said Mark Allen, senior park manager.
Allen said construction of the soccer complex was not slated to begin until at least 2012, and even that depends on inclusion in County Executive Isaiah Leggett’s budget.
Allen’s colleague Eugene Rose, one of two urban foresters for the department, walked around the site pointing out invasive vines and rotten tree limbs.
“This is a structurally unsound tree in an area where we invite people to have a recreational experience,” Rose said.
But after all the fighting between neighbors and the department, trust is tough to muster. The “routine maintenance” is an attempt to chop the trees and make the land easier to develop, Barth and Mirabal said.
“If the park is the patient, and these guys are the doctors, the cure is worse than the disease,” Barth said.
Mirabal is still rankled by the suggestions that their opposition to the soccer fields is due to ethnic, not ecological reasons.
“They think this is a Latino issue, and that offends me,” Mirabal said, adding that officials attribute demand for fields to an increase in the population. “You can be Latino and be an environmentalist. You can be Latino and like open space.”
