Editor’s note: Below find a special report about Church Hill’s ongoing l’affair pétanque. If you haven’t yet, please consider upgrading to keep independent journalism about your neighborhood free for all to read. Here’s how to submit tips, documents, correspondence, etc. with The Lookout for editorial consideration. Regular programming resumes next week.—Dave.

On Sunday, dozens of Church Hill residents gathered at Chimborazo Playground to discuss the sudden construction of additional courts for pétanque, an obscure-in-America bowling game similar to bocce that a local club has played in the neighborhood for two decades. Despite the shade provided by the park’s sycamore trees, the conversation about development processes and priorities for the beloved 3.5-acre green space at times turned heated.

Les Boulefrogs Pétanque Club of Virginia and Community for Chimbo Playground (CCP)—the name of a newly formed grassroots group that has obtained hundreds of signatures on an online petition to halt the buildout until more of the neighborhood has a chance to offer input on the project—and their respective supporters established little common ground. But pretty much everybody agreed on one thing: out of any party involved in l’affair pétanque, City Hall has the most to answer for.

“We were hoping to have an authoritative voice like [City Council President and longtime 7th District representative] Cynthia Newbille to talk to us, or the director” of Richmond’s Departments of Parks, Recreation, and Community Facilities (DPR) said Will Jordan-Cooley, a born-and-raised Church Hill resident and a CCP co-organizer. Alas, despite direct invitations to Newbille and Mayor Danny Avula (a tenured East Ender in his own right), and much frantic outreach to various DPR officials about the unannounced expansion of Chimborazo Playground’s already-considerable pétanque facilities, nobody from 900 East Broad Street appeared at the meeting.

“The problem is that there is nobody here from the city of Richmond,” said Donnie Glass, the owner of Grisette and a resident of Church Hill North, addressing a crowd that numbered about 40 at its height. “There isn't a councilmember, there isn't a Parks Department person, there is nobody here to say, ‘Well, this is why this paperwork got held up for this long, and this is why the funding went to that.’”

Karen Morris-Rankin, the president of the Boulefrogs, echoed this frustration with city officials’ poor communication. “Parks does not move quickly, they move on their own time,” she said, visibly distressed by what several of the meeting’s attendees described as “acrimony” and “vitriol.” “They do not give quick notification on when they're going to do anything.”

The Lookout has reviewed emails from CCP organizers to Mayor Avula and Cynthia Newbille soliciting their attendance at the meeting. The East End politicians did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent Sunday evening, nor did Christopher Frelke, DPR’s director.

Ironically, the speed at which Parks moved last week to bulldoze, grade, and gravel two new plots for an unknown number of additional pétanque courts is part of what has caused so much strife over them. As The Lookout reported Friday, a crew showed up Tuesday and dramatically transformed a chunk of Chimborazo Playground’s lawn in just three days, catching many in the neighborhood off-guard—even plugged-in local activists and self-avowed “power users” of the space.

Of the ~220 respondents to the CCP’s survey about the construction (which circulated via groupchats, social media, and QR-coded flyers the group posted in the neighborhood last week), not one of them said they had been aware of the planned plow-job, co-organizer Jordan-Cooley said.

While various Boulefrogs conceded at Sunday’s meeting that the club’s 45 members could have done a better job notifying their neighbors of the impending work, which Morris-Rankin said she learned about approximately two weeks prior to its start, residents on every side of the issue laid most of the blame on Richmond’s byzantine bureaucracy, where Mayor Avula’s campaign promises of transparency have translated into so little of it that the Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock in March named the city its 2026 “City of Darkness.”

At 5:15pm Friday evening, roughly two hours after The Lookout published its report and five hours after a deadline issued midday Wednesday, the acting deputy director, public affairs within the city’s Office of Strategic Communications & Civic Engagement, provided an official statement on the construction. Wrote Tamara Jenkins (emphasis added):

Jenkins’ response, which did not fully address specific questions The Lookout put to DPR via email, can be read in full here. City officials identified by the Boulefrogs’ Morris-Rankin as involved in the planning process, including DPR deputy director Shamar Young and senior capital project manager Haywood Harrison, have not responded to requests for comment. It still is not clear how much this project is costing taxpayers: while an unofficial proposal obtained by The Lookout puts the price around $17,000, a review of the previous three years of Capital Improvement Projects (CIP) budgets surfaced no mention of pétanque.

The Lookout followed up with Jenkins Sunday afternoon to request an interview with Frelke next week to elucidate this matter.

On Friday evening, the CCP emailed its survey respondents noting that organizers had happened to encounter Newbille on East Broad Street in Church Hill and informed her of distress over the project. “[S]he assured us she is looking into it,” wrote Jordan-Cooley and Erika Stanley.

If she is, that’s a new development. “CM Newbille was not aware of this expansion and [sic] recognize advance notice to the community is always appreciated,” Jenkins added. (The Lookout had not asked DPR whether Newbille, who has represented the 7th District for 17 years, knew about the work in advance.) The Lookout has inquired with Newbille’s office about the CCP’s description of the street-side encounter.

Even as they commiserated with CCP supporters over the DPR’s derelict communication and the absence of Newbille and Avula at the hour-long meeting, the Boulefrogs and their fellow travelers declined multiple entreaties to compromise about the merit of the courts themselves, which stand in a state of partial completion directly to the east of three existing pits already dedicated to this niche sport. (The Boulefrogs “ceded” a fourth court, on the southwest of the cluster, to a “surprise hoop” structure in 2024. This wasn’t pure altruism: that court had long been susceptible to flooding, and was unfavored by the club due to its separation from the others.)

“They went through the proper avenues,” said resident Ryan Walter, referring to the Boulefrogs, about whom he spoke in support several times. “They were not taking it or stealing space from other people […] So I find the distaste towards that pretty distasteful myself.”

“For you to say we followed the rules, sure you followed the rules, absolutely,” said Ben Lazarus, another resident, addressing comments from Morris-Rankin. “The courts are built because you followed the rules. But we're also all neighbors, so to not seek out comment, to not seek out a conversation” with uninvolved parkgoers contributes to a sense that the Boulefrogs had played “insider baseball” to get their way “in the dead of night.”

Mark Rankin, the club’s secretary and Morris-Rankin’s husband, took umbrage with the insinuations of that some clandestine pétanque plot had been exposed, a contention that seems to have gained some traction on various Church Hill-oriented social media thanks to his wife’s dual role as the Boulefrogs’ president and the Friends of Chimborazo Park’s treasurer. “Being a member of more than one organization [simultaneously] does not imply collusion or conspiracy,” he said. (The Friends of Chimborazo Playground Facebook page has not responded to a request for comment sent Thursday.)

After roughly an hour of conversation, CCP co-organizer Stanley took the mic to wrap the meeting. “If we can just hit the pause button [on construction] so that we can all have a fuller picture of what is happening and be able to weigh in that that's going to be a really solid outcome,” she said. In his own closing remarks, Jordan-Cooley called on attendees to contact Newbille, Avula, and Frelke to demand they halt the project to allow for more community input. “I hope that the pétanque players will do it as well,” he said.

Morris-Rankin, Walters, and other pro-pétanque attendees declined to make such a commitment.

This has been a Lookout special report. Regular programming resumes next week. Please submit tips, photos, etc. about the East End for editorial consideration.