To be honest, I don't play much tennis, but the city really needs more public basketball courts. Of course the noise NIMBYs will never let that happen.

You had me at "abdicate".

Charter tennis courts now, what next? Charter police and fire? They actually exist in some communities. Stop privatization, it's antiAmerican.

Privatization is not anti-American and this is not privatization. This is corporatism. The city owns the courts and gave them to a company for free to manage and profit from. Who knows why they gave them the courts, which belong to the public? It could have been a back-room deal involving money and/or sex, or it could have had nothing to do with those things, who knows? The truth is we may never know the full extent of the deal made between Elings Park and the city.

Privatization would have been putting the courts up for sale to the highest bidder. The city would have benefited from the sale and the court fees would reflect the true value of the establishment.

What I would like to see is people in communities getting together and voluntarily contributing to the efforts to bring about sustainable semi-public parks. Parks that are open to the public, but privately owned. Many organized communities already have these in some form, but for communities which have no formal organization some people might be able to contribute to buying or securing the land, others may be able to help with building and maintaining the park itself. Unfortunately with all of the local regulations and property taxes, not to mention income taxes, this would be difficult and expensive to accomplish in our current big government environment. That is why cities for the most part have monopolies on parks. And we get this: even the local community has little control over their own parks.

For the time being, however, I think parks are a reasonable and beneficial way for communities to spend money since parks and open space are things that most people can agree on being important. So I'm certainly not against the city building parks in our current environment. It just means that communities need to be vigilant and involved to make sure that the costs to the community are as close as possible to market rates.

Tomato tomata. This tennis court scandal is symptomatic of the greater agenda that includes private prisons. It's the arrogant attitude of entitlement because one has money (and many times little else to offer but money.) Instead they use money for productive purposes, people like this use it as a weapon.