New S.F. parks plan has united two mortal enemies – tennis players and pickleballers

The San Francisco Recreation and Parks department has managed to do what many thought impossible: It has united the city’s hard court version of the Hatfields and the McCoys — tennis players and pickleballers.

It did so in one unintended but smooth stroke, through a misguided plan to start charging taxpayers for the right to use public courts, a disingenuous scheme initiated without any public hearings that deserves to be volleyed away by any elected official searching for votes this election season.

The proposal would charge tennis and pickleball users $5 per hour for the “right” to reserve a court in San Francisco, raising outrage in the court-playing community that few could have foreseen. Close to 2,000 have signed protest letters and petitions, so far, to the deaf ears of Rec and Park officials and the commission that oversees it.

It’s set to be heard in the budget committee of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Thursday before it heads to the full board itself.

The reason that tennis and pickleball players are so upset is that the pay-to-play proposal is based on a false and faulty premise. According to the Recreation and Parks department website: “For years, players have asked Rec and Park to implement a modest reservation fee to prevent unused bookings and ensure fair access (to courts).”

Really? In the 40 years I’ve been playing tennis on San Francisco’s public courts, I’ve never heard a single person say that they wanted a paid reservation system. In fact, I never heard that players wanted a reservation system at all.

For all the decades that existed before officials at Rec and Park decided to enact a reservation system, the free public court system somehow worked, with few disputes, and as far I’m aware, no injuries. Tennis and, more recently, pickleball players, knew the rules and generally abided by them. There was no need for public department intervention.

So, it was a surprise when shortly before the pandemic, Rec and Park instituted a reservation system. In typical fashion, however, the system it adopted was a bad miss, relying on poor software and no way for the department to hold players accountable for flaking on their reservations. The department recently rolled out improvements to that system, but not before coming up with the proposed reach into players’ pockets. (It also wants to charge coaches who use the courts a percentage of their earnings, which seems overly harsh and unnecessary.)

It also begs the question of why we pay property taxes in San Francisco. Public roads, public safety, public libraries, public courts, public transportation? Well, at least the libraries seem to work.

Members of the pickleball community have determined that at least eight private high schools in San Francisco use public tennis courts (for free) several months of the year, totaling approximately 14,000 hours. With those schools costing around $50,000 in tuition each year, perhaps a small fee could be charged with little public protest.

I understand that a cash-strapped department is always looking for ways to make money. But rather than charge players on a daily basis more in a month than they are currently shelling out to Big Pharma, here is a better idea: Take a page from the city of Los Angeles, which has many more publicly maintained and operated courts and long ago figured out a way to keep them that way.

Los Angeles charges an annual fee to players for the right to reserve courts and use that fee for their annual maintenance. The courts, from Griffith Park to Pacific Palisades, are open for play from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. each day (some do charge an hourly fee) because they are lighted and, unlike San Francisco, generally pristine.

If Rec and Park wants to charge me $25 a year for the right to reserve a court, I’ll happily do so and I’m sure others would as well. But the city has to keep a bargain to use the fees to maintain the courts. It took Rec and Park 25 years to resurface the courts where I play, which at the end were akin to hitting out of a unkept sand bunker.

If I want to pay for public courts in San Francisco, I can choose to play at the Goldman Center in Golden Gate Park. But if the department wants to privatize another part of the public park system, it will have to do so with little public support. It will cost a lot of current and aspiring officeholders who court votes in San Francisco.

Ken Garcia is a San Francisco native and a former Chronicle columnist