Invoking the history, natural beauty and preciousness of Mercer Island parks, a group aiming to protect them gathered at Island Crest Park on March 12.

“We Mercer Islanders have a proud history of caring for our parks and open spaces. Because we live on an island, and cannot expand outwards in any direction without going into the water, it is particularly important that we protect our open, public park land,” said Meg Lippert, president of Concerned Citizens for Mercer Island Parks (CCMIP).

The group has written an initiative petition to “Protect our Parks,” which needs 3,000 signatures by June 2 to be on the Nov. 8 ballot. The initiative would prevent the city of Mercer Island from selling, transferring, leasing or changing parkland to a “non-park use” without replacing it with parkland of equal size and value in the same vicinity.

Under state law, the parks initiative is considered a ballot proposition — any initiative proposed to be submitted to the voters after it has been initially filed and before its circulation for signatures. The initiative itself does not protect the parks, but it does put the issue before voters.

If passed, the measure would disallow the city from putting any facilities in parkland other than restrooms, docks, permanent play equipment, play fields, artificial turf, forested areas and underground utilities. According to the petition, “non-parkland uses” specifically include: community center, recycling center, swimming pools, housing, city administrative offices, parking garages and transportation facilities.

In addition, one of the prohibited uses is “performing arts center.”

This clause prompted the forming of a rival group, Support MI Parks and Arts, which says that the petition will preclude the planned Mercer Island Center for the Arts (MICA) from being built in Mercerdale Park, and could have farther reaching consequences.

“It should be called ‘restrict our parks,’ not ‘protect our parks,'” said Becki Snellenberg, a MICA director.

The petition does not mention MICA by name, but opponents of the petition say its real goal is to stop MICA and Youth Theatre Northwest (YTN) from building a facility at the site of the old recycling center in Mercerdale Park.

The petition was filed soon after the City Council approved a Memorandum of Understanding that enabled environmental review to begin on MICA.

The Concerned Citizens group says the timing was “coincidental.” The group modeled its initiative after a similar one passed in Seattle in 1997.

But the rival group says that there are multiple performing arts centers in Seattle parks. The MICA/YTN project would be allowed under the Seattle law, but not the Mercer Island one, they say.

Islanders have a long history of protecting parks, and voting against proposals to put buildings, such as City Hall and the fire station, in Mercerdale Park. The Concerned Citizens group lobbied the council to conduct an advisory vote to gauge community reaction on building MICA in Mercerdale, but the council voted it down.

The Concerned Citizens seem to see MICA as the last straw in a series of council decisions that have “threatened” parks, such as proposing to build a commuter parking lot on Luther Burbank Park’s Kite Hill and selling a portion of Clarke Beach to a neighbor who was unknowingly encroaching on the park.

Councilmember Dan Grausz, a vocal supporter of MICA and opponent of the initiative, said that the council has done nothing but add land to its parks system, purchasing Luther Burbank Park and the Engstrom Open Space and adding the Southeast 53rd Street greenbelt.

But the Concerned Citizens point to the danger of a recent example in Kent, where the City Council sold a 10-acre public park to a developer. The argument there was the same as with MICA — that the land is lightly used and not valuable in its current state.

“Nearby cities … have not protected their parks, and so have recently lost park land to regional pressures for open land to build on,” Lippert said.

With anxieties about growth, density and development building across the region, especially in Mercer Island, protecting all of the Island’s 475 acres of park land is necessary, the Concerned Citizens say. But this initiative places another Island institution, YTN, at risk, opponents say. Currently operating out of a church, YTN will likely have to move off-Island if MICA’s progress is delayed.

The Concerned Citizens group’s work in recent months has expanded beyond protecting parks.

The group sent binders of information to each council member and to the Reporter with documents analyzing the proposed ground lease with MICA, criticizing “MICA parking and traffic congestion issues” and outlining the city’s “potential liability exposure” by evaluating of MICA’s finances and giving it a 60 percent survival rate.

The city’s ongoing environmental review of MICA will look at issues with parking, wetlands and other critical areas, and will be completed before the council considers signing a lease for the land.

In the meantime, neither supporters nor opponents of the initiative will be allowed to speak about it during public comment at City Council meetings, as the use of city meeting time and other resources for campaign-related purposes is an unlawful use of a public facility.

If the required number of signatures are gathered, the council must consider whether to (1) adopt the ballot proposition by ordinance; (2) reject the ballot proposition, in which case the proposition would go to the voters; or (3) adopt an alternative to the ballot proposition, in which case both the original and the alternative propositions would go to the voters.

Learn more about the petition at www.protectmiparks.org and the rebuttal at www.supportmiparksandarts.com.