No Response from Arlington 2050. The Plan Still Skips Field Access.

A few weeks ago I wrote about my family's experience with sports access in Arlington. I offered that I'd love a conversation with the Arlington 2050 planning team. I still would. Until then, here's more on what the plan leaves out, and why it matters.

Arlington 2050, the first rewrite of our Comprehensive Plan since 1960, is being finalized right now. Sports doesn't get a word, in a document meant to address a youth mental health crisis and an economic mobility gap that sports access is proven to help close.

The county will say that's fine and cite its own numbers. In 2022, its resident satisfaction survey found 81% satisfied with the quality of parks, recreation, and sports programs. But that survey asked about quality, not access. The families and neighborhoods that never got off a waitlist were never in that number to begin with.

Of the nine community focus groups Arlington ran for this plan, not one was built for sports families or recreational users. Teens were included, and their group raised access to sports and recreation. The county's own draft still doesn't reflect it.

The numbers tell a similar story. County staff acknowledged their own field permit data "isn't necessarily 100% accurate," after nearly two years of tracking it. And facing years of complaints about field scarcity, the county's response was to repurpose the last handful of drop-in fields into permit-only space instead of adding capacity.

Arlington is converting two grass fields at Kenmore Middle School to synthetic turf, with the Arlington Soccer Association and Arlington Sports Foundation each contributing a million dollars alongside county and school dollars. Construction was greenlit this month. That's proof Arlington can add real field capacity when partners bring capital to the table. What's still missing is a plan that treats this as the rule instead of the exception.

Arlington's own Public Spaces Master Plan, adopted in 2019, estimated the county could need six more rectangular fields by 2025. That year has come and gone, unmet. Five more are projected as needed between 2025 and 2035. But look at what the county's new Capital Improvement Plan actually funds against that backdrop. The pattern is stark. Nearly every project in it, Barcroft, Gateway Park, Quincy Park, Shirlington Park, a dozen more, is general park and open space work. Not one adds a field.

The Arlington 2050 language will serve as the north star for every plan element that follows. In my written comment to the county in June, I asked planners to name sports and recreation specifically in the sections covering public infrastructure and community wellbeing. Separate from the Arlington 2050 revision process, a PSMP refresh is underway too. New fields should be part of that update too. Whether they are starts with what Arlington 2050 says once the county finalizes it.

Arlington's own Civic Federation has asked the Board to slow down and answer basic questions before moving forward. In a June letter, ACCF wrote that the draft principles remain too abstract to act on and that the promised concrete language for the plan's introduction still hasn't been shared with the public.

This hasn't been finalized yet. There's still time. County Board, please name field access in Arlington 2050 as a mandate.

Sam Myers Jr.

28-year Arlington resident and parent of student athletes

sam@sammyersjr.com