# Playground



## conarb (Apr 2, 2017)

The  City of Livermore has a historic oak tree with a children's play structure under it, the tree is old and failing so they were going to cut it down, neighbors have fought to save and support the old tree but to relocate the playground structure will cost $1.2 million to comply with ADA.



			
				East Bay Times said:
			
		

> The children’s playground structure, originally placed where it is so the tree would shade it, will need to be removed because of the potential for falling limbs. It will cost $1.2 million to replace it elsewhere, according to the district.
> 
> An average life expectancy of a play structure is between 25 to 30 years, and the current playground is about 20 years old, said district spokeswoman Lea Blevins.
> 
> ...



Open the link below to see the little playground structure that will cost $1.2 million to replace because of ADA.  I know from personal experience that any ADA compliant work is extremely expensive because of insurance costs, but this is ridiculous. 


¹ http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/03...sh-granted-as-tree-is-saved-but-at-what-cost/


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## Msradell (Apr 2, 2017)

Of course you also have to wonder why it wasn't built to comply with ADA requirements when it was built. It's 20 years old according to the article and thus was built after the ADA was enacted.

That playground certainly doesn't look like it would cost that much to replace even if it had to be made compliant.


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## conarb (Apr 2, 2017)

Msradell said:


> Of course you also have to wonder why it wasn't built to comply with ADA requirements when it was built. It's 20 years old according to the article and thus was built after the ADA was enacted.



Was playground equipment included in the original ADA?  I doubt it since ADA regulations have exploded exponentially on a yearly basis. 



> That playground certainly doesn't look like it would cost that much to replace even if it had to be made compliant.



Sure doesn't, in fact doesn't look like more than a thousand or two in equipment, the only thing I can think of is contractors' liability insurance to cover playground equipment is astronomical, only large scale contractors can qualify for ADA work as it is.  What I don't understand is that as it stands the city is in a terrible situation, a retarded kid falls off the monkey bars and the city gets sued, especially now that it's published in the paper that the city knew that the existing equipment wasn't in compliance.


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## steveray (Apr 3, 2017)

We have done them here in town for nowhere near that money...But everything is stupid expensive on the wrong coast...


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## Rick18071 (Apr 3, 2017)

Maybe the cost includes buying land for the new playground?


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## ADAguy (Apr 3, 2017)

Obviously more to this story then meets the eye, time will tell.


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## ADAguy (Apr 3, 2017)

Of further note, if built with Federal funds (CDBG or others) it would also fall under Section 504 0f the Rehab act of 1973 - Section 794 - Federal Grants and ASTM F1487 Standard.


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## north star (Apr 3, 2017)

*# ~ # ~ #*

Forget re-locating the equipment.......It is too cost prohibitive,
plus it is a liability \ law-suit waiting to happen............Simply
send the city of Livermore Public Works crews out there and
demolish the site.

If the good citizens of Livermore "Save the Tree Action Committee"
wants another ADA compliant park, then [  IMO  ] it is time for
them to pony up the funding.

This is a Win-Win for everybody !


*# ~ # ~ #*


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## conarb (Apr 3, 2017)

North Star said:
			
		

> If the good citizens of Livermore "Save the Tree Action Committee"
> wants another ADA compliant park, then [ IMO ] it is time for
> them to pony up the funding.
> 
> This is a Win-Win for everybody !



Is play equipment even legal under ADA anymore?  There is a park a few blocks from me, they had to 'remodel' it to meet ADA, it took a year and I don't know how much money and I don't see any play equipment now, all I see are large concrete walkways for wheelchairs and new lawn.  When it was done I saw the local senior center with short buses full of old people with walkers, volunteers were showing people with walkers how to navigate around the bumps on those yellow pads.  Tonight I'll take a walk over there and see if maybe some playground equipment is hidden behind trees or something.


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## conarb (Apr 3, 2017)

I went by the park and I was wrong, there is new play equipment, it has just been relocated to the back of the park and I hadn't noticed.

While I have no sympathy for "save the trees" type environmentalists I do not see it as their responsibility to pay for ADA compliant play equipment, as far as I am concerned if ADA compliance is so expensive the parks should just be shut down, the land sold, and private developers can build sorely needed housing, we have people sleeping on the streets, under freeways and any place they can find, we have an area surrounded by parks and other public lands all over the place, the only problem is that our regulations are so onerous that any new housing will be very expensive. Of course the sale of the land should bring lots of money into the cities to help fund their pension obligations that are in collapse nationwide at this point.


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## Yikes (Apr 4, 2017)

From the article: "The old playset can’t really be moved and reused, because once it’s changed, it needs to be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, McCune said."
Wait a minute... I thought that ADA applies to existing public accommodations?  I can understand how a move would trigger CBC at least a 20% expenditure (rubber play surface?), but isn't ADA already an issue for this equipment, regardless of whether it moves or not?


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## Yikes (Apr 4, 2017)

A side comment unrelated to ADA: here in California, one of the consequences of oak tree protection ordinances is that almost no one is planting new oak trees.  Who wants to restrict their future property use by planting a tree that triggers prohibition of development in its root zone?
There are some exceptions, mostly in the public/institutional sector (parks, arboretums, street trees), as well as developments that are forced to plant them as a condition of approval.  But there will come a point in the future when the old trees will reach the end of their life, and the replacement oaks will be few or none.
Even in places where oaks already exist, when they die off or are blown over in a windstorm, people replace them with "weed" trees like Chinese elms.

A few years ago we did a park renovation project.  The park was planted with native trees in the early 1900s, and with their normal lifespan, most will die within the next 10-20 years.  The city landscape architect and city arborist recommended a phased selective removal and replacement-in-kind of native trees so that in 20 years the park wouldn't look barren, but that proposal was shot down by the citizen's committee.  No one wanted to be on record as having voted for cutting down an existing tree, even if it means their kids and grandkids will have a park without trees.


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## conarb (Apr 4, 2017)

Yikes said:


> From the article: "The old playset can’t really be moved and reused, because once it’s changed, it needs to be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, McCune said."
> Wait a minute... I thought that ADA applies to existing public accommodations?  I can understand how a move would trigger CBC at least a 20% expenditure (rubber play surface?), but isn't ADA already an issue for this equipment, regardless of whether it moves or not?


Just speculation but what if the city was staring at a huge liability with that playset but didn't want to occur citizen displeasure by removing it, so they used the tree fight as a way of ridding themselves of the playset entirely, that could also explain what appears to be a drastically inflated cost estimate for a new playset. 



			
				Yikes said:
			
		

> Who wants to restrict their future property use by planting a tree that triggers prohibition of development in its root zone?



In the 80s I bought a lot and was in the design approval process to build 5 units on it, the lot had two oaks, one huge beautiful oak that my architect was designing the project around, the other on the north end of the propert had blown over with a huge root clump sticking about 8' in the air but part of the roots were still in the ground and there was some green on the tree.  The city required I provide an arborist's report, I called a guy and met him on the site, when there he said he thought he could save that tree with a lot of care, that it would look good lying on it's side, I told him I wanted that tree out of there.  When I got his report he recommended trying to save the tree with periodic injections of vitamins and pruning, it looked to me like he was trying to get a lifetime service contract to maintain that tree, I sold the property to let some other poor contractor deal with that tree. 

This can get expensive, I built a home in the 70s for an attorney, the lot was covered with oaks running down to a creek, the architect designed around all trees and set the home on 27 telephone poles so as to not disturb the root systems of the trees,  as I was preparing to start the owner said to me: "Dick there are only two reasons I will sue you on this house, one if I catch you putting one piece of plastic in my house, and two if you kill one of my trees."  I built a bridge to get to the front door but there was still a concrete foundation at that point, when we excavated for the foundation we cut a lot of oak tree roots on one oak tree, the owner brought in an arborist and he spent weeks with 55 gallon drums of what he called vitamins injecting them into the ground at the base of the tree, that was 45 years ago, the owner is long dead but the tree is still standing.


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## ADAguy (Apr 5, 2017)

Oh the webs you have woven and the book of "tales" you could write.


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## conarb (Apr 5, 2017)

ADAguy said:


> Oh the webs you have woven and the book of "tales" you could write.


Nothing like the *late great George Carlin*


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## ADAguy (Apr 6, 2017)

agreed!


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## conarb (Apr 6, 2017)

Carlin did an entire comedy routine called "*George* *Carlin*: I'm Tired Of This Handicap Business." click on the You Tube link and you get *this*, these disability activists now have the power to censure our free speech!


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## tmurray (Apr 6, 2017)

conarb said:


> Carlin did an entire comedy routine called "*George* *Carlin*: I'm Tired Of This Handicap Business." click on the You Tube link and you get *this*, these disability activists now have the power to censure our free speech!



Yes. It certainly wasn't removed at the request of the copyright holder as it violated the copyright the production company had on the special this is from.


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## conarb (Apr 6, 2017)

tmurray said:


> Yes. It certainly wasn't removed at the request of the copyright holder as it violated the copyright the production company had on the special this is from.


TMurray:

Where did you get that?  All of his other videos are still up, including his famous "Save the Planet" routine.


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## tmurray (Apr 6, 2017)

Automated algorithms for copyright infringement are mostly only used for music (10 seconds or more). For videos, it is a complaint based system. Once YouTube receives a complaint they set the video to private and wait for the user to contact for mediation.


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## conarb (Apr 6, 2017)

So what you are telling us is that some disability activist complained about George Carlin after his death and You Tube took it down 'temporarily", this after George Carlin fought the the famous Seven Dirty Words case all the way to the Supreme Court.



			
				Wikipedia said:
			
		

> This decision formally established indecency regulation in American broadcasting. In follow-up rulings, the Supreme Court established the safe harbor provision that grants broadcasters the right to broadcast indecent (but not obscene) material between the hours of 10 pm and 6 am, when it is presumed many children will be asleep. The FCC has never maintained a specific list of words prohibited from the airwaves during the time period from 6 am to 10 pm, but it has alleged that its own internal guidelines are sufficient to determine what it considers obscene.
> 
> The seven dirty words have been assumed to be likely to elicit indecency-related action by the FCC if uttered on a TV or radio broadcast, and thus the broadcast networks generally censor themselves with regard to many of the seven dirty words. The FCC regulations regarding "fleeting" use of expletives were ruled unconstitutionally vague by a three-judge panel of the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York on July 13, 2010, as they violated the First Amendment due to their possible effects regarding free speech.¹




¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words


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## conarb (Apr 6, 2017)

the Daily Bell said:
			
		

> Oh and how convenient that when governments are able to force Youtube to take down extremist content online, they may just have given themselves the power to regulate any free speech on the internet, whether it is truly extremist or not.
> 
> And that is what this all comes down to. The government wants control over the internet, control over what we say, and how we communicate.
> 
> ...




¹ http://www.thedailybell.com/news-an...overnments-are-blaming-youtube-for-terrorism/


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## CityKin (Apr 6, 2017)

I love old trees and I really dislike when people cut them down because of fear of lawsuits. 

However, I live in the Midwest, and I've never heard of a single local or state ordinance prohibiting the removal of any tree whether on public or private property.  California is crazy.  Its just a tree after all. Plant a new one.


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## Yikes (Apr 6, 2017)

CityKin, from a local paper this week:

"PASADENA >> In response to a rash of tree deaths, the City Council Tuesday voted to strengthen its tree protection ordinance, upping fines for illegal tree removal from $108 to as much as $10,000 per offense, plus the possibility of jail time...
The new ordinance may include criminal misdemeanor charges and fines of $1,000 a day per offense and up to one year in jail, said City Attorney/City Prosecutor Michele Bagneris."​
Note the anthropomorphizing serial-killer language, "rash of tree DEATHS", when talking about tree removal.  Welcome to California.

FYI, the picture in the accompanying article is of the ficus street trees in Pasadena.  Ficus is a type of fig tree, and it drops tiny fruits on the sidewalk which get crushed underfoot and dragged into the floors of the shops and restaurants, where the mush attracts rats and flies and becomes a health dept. hazard (especially if you are a restaurant).  The aggressive tree roots are also uplifting the sidewalks, creating ADA problems and trip hazards.   
All the business owners want them chopped down and replaced with something less hazardous, but that is being prevented by the city's "Urban Forestry Commission".

Welcome to California!


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## conarb (Apr 6, 2017)

Yikes:

Talk about anthropomorphizing, after years of fighting to get a house approved I finally overcame all resistance, the County's last line of defense against new homes was the SE plan checker, she drove the costs beyond reason, after meetings between her and my SE I agreed to pay for all of her requests (one was a $44,000 change in post to beam connections), as I was finally at the counter processing the permit the SE came walking by, she asked: "You really going to build this thing?" I said: "What do you think I've been fighting for all these years?" She said: "This house should be all steel." I said; "I've got a full red iron frame."  She asked: "Do you know how many trees will die for you to build this house?"


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## Yikes (Apr 7, 2017)

conarb said:


> She asked: "Do you know how many trees will die for you to build this house?"



The snappy comeback:  "Do you know how many trees already died just so I could print all the paperwork and plan revisions?"


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## conarb (Apr 7, 2017)

The City of Concord is also having to replace their playground structure, no mention of ADA but we all know why, they are getting theirs for a mere $500,000, they diverted attention from ADA by making a contest out of it.



			
				News Locker said:
			
		

> CONCORD — The people have spoken.
> 
> From March 13-24, residents had an opportunity to vote for one of four play structures to replace the aging one at the Civic Center complex. Of the 439 votes cast, the winning design concept pictured above received 254.
> 
> The city has allocated $500,000 to replace the 19-year-old play equipment at the Civic Center complex at 1950 Parkside Drive. Construction may begin in late spring or early summer.¹



Click on the article below to see an artists' rendering of the new half million play structure. 


¹ http://www.newslocker.com/en-ca/reg...he-winning-playground-is-east-bay-times/view/


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