City eyes pickleball solutions

Though city council members are undecided on the best move for the community, the consensus is the same: it’s time to stop dinking around.

At a council workshop Tuesday, Parks and Recreation Director Brian Smith presented three options for temporary or permanent pickleball courts in Oak Harbor. The discussion followed previous meetings in which pickleball enthusiasts raised concerns about the lack of facilities while tennis players worried about the potential loss of courts for their preferred sport.

Smith explained that there are currently four pickleball courts at Rotary Park, two at a Christian church that is open for play occasionally and three at the Roller Barn for occasional use. Still, new pickleball courts have been a priority among the Oak Harbor community members for about a decade, Smith explained.

After receiving more than 30 comments from pickleball players and other athletes about the courts at Sumner Park and Windjammer and Fort Nugent, council members agreed that they needed to find a location that would both allow for pickleball play as soon as possible and interfere the least with other sports.

The first option Smith outlined would create four temporary pickleball courts: two at Sumner Park, which is currently a tennis courts facility, and two at Fort Nugent Park, which is currently a basketball court, for $6,575. He also highlighted the alternative of converting one of the two tennis courts at Sumner Park into four permanent pickleball courts. The third possibility, he said, is to create an eight-court pickleball complex at Fort Nugent Park, with a base bid total of $61,475, which would require a Washington Wildlife and Recreation Program grant.

The unofficial consensus of the council, as Mayor Ronnie Wright summed up at the end of the discussion, was to see if option one and two can work in the next year while still pursuing the eight-court facility in the future.

Building the eight-court complex at Fort Nugent Park wouldn’t interfere with other sports. However, if the council waits and the city doesn’t win that grant, pickleball players won’t be happy, Councilmember Bryan Stucky acknowledged, calling it a “mostly no-win scenario.” He noted that he may want to support the decision to convert courts at Fort Nugent with data on usage, adding that he would consider standing out there with a clicker if he must.

For park attendance, the parks department uses trail counters, Smith said, though they don’t track the attendance currently. Based on his own observations, he said the basketball courts at Fort Nugent are used but pickleball players would likely utilize them more often.

“You probably will lose a lot of the neighborhoods that are able to use that for that purpose, but maybe they will pick up pickleball instead,” Smith said.

Councilmember Barbara Armes wondered if city officials could work with the Oak Harbor School District, which owns Rotary Park, to find more times to open their pickleball courts so the city could spend less money on convertingcourts into pickleball. Wright suggested the alternative that the city could fund up to $50,000 to convert a tennis court at Sumner Park into four pickleball courts and ask community members to pitch in for the rest. This was met with approval from Armes.

There was a separate discussion led by Councilmember Eric Marshall to convert both of the tennis courts at Sumner Park into multi-use courts, allowing for six or more pickleball courts to exist.

This isn’t uncommon. Smith has seen dual-purpose pickleball and tennis courts in all the cities he has worked in over the last decade, he noted. While the city doesn’t organize tournament play, Smith said, tennis players tend not to like dual-purpose court use because they cannot be used to host tournaments. However, if the city opts to have dual-purpose courts, the lines will be brightly colored and easy to differentiate, he said.

While the council members didn’t reach an official consensus, Councilmember Sandi Peterson stressed urgency for the situation.

“We have people driving from our county to another county to do pickleball. I have people who visit here from Texas and say, ‘What, you don’t have pickleball?’” Peterson said, backing up her support for converting one of the two tennis courts at Sumner Park into four pickleball courts. “It’s embarrassing to me that we are not doing something that a lot of people want.”

Armes noted that the city was denied the grant for the courts previously, saying it isn’t the council that is making the process slow.

City staff will bring the revised options and the dollar evaluation to the next council meeting, according to Grants Administrator Wendy Horn.