No Play in This Field of Dispute

It wasn’t a single voice that drove David Kelly to do what he did. It was a chorus of voices, mostly from his own family.

The voices told him, “If you build it, they will come.” So he did. Kelly, a 41-year-old sign-maker with two children in Little League, built a regulation-size baseball field in his mother’s horse pasture.

Sure enough, they came: His two children, their cousins and their friends came to play baseball on the old Kelly Ranch. Then came some city inspectors. They told Kelly his field was illegal and shut it down. Kelly and his supporters cried foul and to this day refuse, in his words, “to play the city’s game.”

What has ensued in this town of 12,000 just east of Seattle is a good old-fashioned property rights fight with all the stock characters: the outraged citizen, the rigid bureaucracy and the innocent victims -- the Little Leaguers.

Kelly, the outraged citizen, has played up his role, invoking the inherent patriotism of baseball, not to mention his 80-year-old mother, Violet, who has told city planners that she just wants her kids and grandkids to enjoy the family farm.

What makes this conflict different is that the bureaucracy, in this case the Issaquah Planning Department, has its own politically galvanizing icon to invoke: salmon, that most honored of Northwest denizens.

Turns out a salmon-bearing stream, Tibbetts Creek, runs through the Kelly Ranch, and the stream runs along a government-designated flood plain. Building on a flood plain without the proper environmental reviews and safeguards can harm the salmon.

So besides being an issue of property rights versus government control, the conflict is also, on one level, baseball versus salmon. The city wants Kelly to pay for the appropriate reviews and permits, costing anywhere from $20 to $5,000.

Kelly doesn’t intend to pay a penny. “On principle,” he says.

Kevin Costner didn’t have to deal with bureaucrats.

Costner played the lead character in the 1989 movie “Field of Dreams,” in which an Iowa farmer, after hearing a voice tell him, “If you build it, he will come,” carves out a baseball diamond in his cornfield. One of those who come is the long-dead baseball player Shoeless Joe Jackson, but the message has been interpreted as one of taking chances in pursuit of a dream.

Kelly knew he was taking a chance when he and his family began clearing out the pasture three years ago. Although they don’t live on the ranch, Kelly spends most of his days there, running his sign-making business out of an old building. He began spending more time there once the field project started.

When inspectors would stop and ask about the work, Kelly told them it was a play field for his family. The inspectors kept an eye on the project but did not insist on permits until recently.

The “Field of Dreams” theme was a constant in family banter during two years of clearing and construction, all done and paid for by family and friends. The field came together a piece at a time, with one of the last additions being the fence separating the infield from the dugouts.

Out of respect for the movie, Kelly is considering planting corn around the baseball field. The whole project began as “a neat idea”: fun for the family and helpful to the city of Issaquah.

This fast-growing suburb in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains doesn’t have enough regulation fields to accommodate the league’s 83 teams, said Issaquah Little League president Brad Arbaugh. Having at least two teams practice on the Kelly field, Arbaugh said, was beneficial to the league.

The Kelly kids and their cousins began practicing with their teams on the field two years ago, before it was even finished. Officials shut it down in April, and Kelly has been fighting City Hall ever since.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” Kelly says. Standing in the middle of the diamond, in the heart of the 28-acre pasture that his family has owned for more than three decades, he is a picture of indignation. His tousled hair and fiery blue eyes evoke the image of a man in the middle of a brawl.

“This is about government trying to stick its fingers in a private matter, trying to tell us what we can and can’t do in our own backyard,” he says. “This is about government picking on little kids trying to play baseball.”

Kelly has attracted a following in the last few months. He’s been a guest on several local talk-radio shows, and his plight has been told in local newspapers. As he stands in his field, just off a busy highway, motorists honk and yell support in a steady stream. He’s become something of a property rights champion.

City planners say Kelly not only jeopardized the salmon in Tibbetts Creek, but -- by having organized teams use the field -- he created a public park, and parks are required to meet certain safety and traffic standards.

“The City Council adopts land-use regulations, and we have laws that regulate all aspects of the city. Our job is to administer, and to work with the code enforcement officer. If laws are being violated, it’s our job to enforce the laws that have their origin in protecting the public,” says Planning Director Mark Hinthorne.

If the conflict is going to be resolved, it probably will be due to the efforts of people like Issaquah City Councilman Bill Conley, who seems to see both sides. During a hearing last week, Conley came across as sympathetic, and even supportive, of Kelly’s desire to use his family’s land the way he wants to.

But Conley says it’s wrong to depict city planners as villains.

The way it’s being told by some people, Conley says, the city of Issaquah isn’t just against kids, but against mother, baseball and apple pie. “That’s big-time what’s happening here,” he says. The black-and-white depiction, he says, clouds the mundane truth.

“If you want to remodel your house, in every city that exists in this country, you have to get a permit,” Conley says. Ultimately, he says, the permits, and the reviews that go with them, are intended to protect the owners and neighbors, and future owners and neighbors.

In the case of the flood plain, he says, environmental reviews are required to protect the salmon that spawn in the streams. A main reason some species of salmon are endangered, he says, is because property owners have destroyed or altered the vast network of streams that salmon need to repopulate.

Conley says that when it comes down to it, this isn’t a David versus Goliath story, nor even a contest of baseball versus salmon.

“This is a matter of one individual who didn’t like being told what to do,” he says, adding that Kelly has to follow the same rules everyone else does if he’s going to live within a society.

Conley says the city appears more willing to bend than Kelly.

City planners have told Kelly that if he wants to use his baseball field for organized games, tournaments, even camps, it would require permits that could cost as much as $5,000.

But seeing that there’s so much support for Kelly, and that his intentions are essentially good, the city might be willing to let it go -- for now -- with a simple special-events permit that he must renew every year.

The annual cost: $20.

Conley says he’s volunteered to pay the fee for Kelly, but Kelly has refused it.

Meanwhile, baseball season proceeds, kids look for diamonds to practice on, and the Kelly field, overseen by a couple of curious horses, slowly is being encroached upon by an army of buttercups, known around these parts as weeds.