Why are there no swings in Hawaii Playgrounds?

If you are a parent, teacher, or born before 1985, it's a pretty good bet that your childhood memories of the playground include a swing set. Because these memories are so positive, it is very puzzling for most to see swings disappear from our schools and playgrounds. Is this a state-wide conspiracy against children having fun? No. Welcome to the new economics of the playground.

To understand this, we first must examine what has changed since we played on the playground (Actually it's my hope that you never stopped).

When we were children, nobody was keeping track of how children sustained playground injuries. Although it is a safe bet that you or nobody you know never got seriously hurt on the playground, the new findings show that you're more fortunate than you might think. In the past decade and a half, studies by the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) and other playground safety groups have produced some pretty solid data on playground injury. The results of these studies showed an alarming rate of injury (0ver 200,000 a year) on our public playgrounds. The finding of these studies vary slightly in some areas but uniformly they all showed one glaring statistic, an average of 75% of all injuries in the playground involve a fall to the surface.

Using the results from over a decade of extensive research, the CPSC has put together a set of guidelines for playground design and installation. You can find the complete set of guidelines here if you are interested in seeing them:

http://www.islandrecreation.net/downloads/CPSC_Guidelines.pdf

In these guidelines there is a safety surface requirement that dicates a "use zone" for each type of component that should have a protective safety surface. Because of the nature of swings and the possibilies for misuse (you know, all the things you used to do), they have the largest surfacing requirement of any piece of equipment. A basic summary of the surfacing area required is double the swing beam height in each direction. So if a swing has an 8' high beam it needs 32' of surfacing. That's big, really big!

So returning to today's playground economics; The swing itself is a pretty affordable piece of equipment with the cost ranging between $800.00 to $2500.00. But if a school or park is in compliance with CPSC and the ADA (this will be featured in a seperate post) surfacing requirement, the cost for same swing installed can be as much as $20,000.00!

The understandable reaction to the "new playground economics" is outrage. Before sitting down and writing your city councilperson, please allow me to bring this back into perspective for you. We now know that the playgrounds we grew up on where dangerous irregardless of our own experience. Once viewed as a whole, we learned that children were getting seriously hurt on them at an unacceptable pace. Providing safe environments for our children to play in sometime involves some compromise to our own memories of the playground. But before you start feeling sorry for the kids today, look at some of the playgrounds featured on this page. Playground designers are coming up with new and exciting things that we never dreamed possible as children!

$773.00 for a trash can?

I thought I would share my letter to the editor of the Star Bulletin in the likely event that it ends up in his $10.00 round file. This was written in response to the linked article below on the City and County spending $773.00 on a trash can.

http://starbulletin.com/2005/03/19/news/index1.html

March 19, 2005

Dear Star Bulletin Editor:

I read your headline story entitled, $773 for a Trash Can and like most who read it, I got angry. However, unlike most people, my anger is NOT directed towards the Harris administration for spending that much money on trash cans.

My company sells and distributes outdoor site furnishings and we were one of the local companies with similar products that were not given an opportunity to bid on this project. Therefore, if anyone should have a problem with a "sole source "contact of this nature, it should be us. However, my ire is focused on the statement made by the City auditor that "$300,000 could have been saved if they shopped around." This leaves readers with the impression that the City could purchase a trash can of equal quality and value for half of the price. That is just not true. It also insinuates that responsible City purchasing is adorning our City with cheapest products we can find. For outdoor site furnishings in our tropical environment, a significantly lower price tag means lower quality, a shorter life span, and a much greater "long term" cost to the taxpayer.

What we need to do is to take a hard look at the procurement laws that Mr. Tanaka is tasked to enforce. City officials are forced to purchase the lowest- priced products with no consideration to quality, product life, service, or warranties. Nationwide, Honolulu is one of the few major cities in the U.S. that does not have a procurement law that encourages evaluation of the quality and price of the products that we buy.

I once participated in a forum with a group of Japanese businessmen and tried to explain Hawaii’s low bid purchasing system to them. I explained that the City and County solicited bids publicly and the prices are listed from low to high and read publicly. The response was, "Oh, knowing who offers the lowest price seems to be a good way to AVOID purchasing the cheapest products!"

Mike McFarlane
Island Recreation