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. Check the liveblog for reporting odds-and-ends about this controversy.—Dave.

Temperatures were running high literally and figuratively Tuesday night, as East Enders packed St. John’s Church parish hall to capacity on a sweltering evening to hear official explanations and speak their minds on the vexing matter that has roiled Church Hill residents for going on three weeks: l’affair pétanque.

The angst in the air stemmed from the process, price tag, and general perplexity of the currently-halted construction of pétanque courts at Chimborazo Playground. As it happened, the CHA had already scheduled the director of Richmond’s Department of Parks, Recreation, and Community Facilities (DPR) Christopher Frelke to address its membership about an unrelated matter at this month’s meeting.

But shortly after bulldozers plowed up a section of field at the ~3.5-acre park in early May to make way for additional graded gravel pits for the French bowling game popular with the local Les Boulefrogs Pétanque Club of Virginia, the neighborhood org invited longtime 7th District councilmember Cynthia Newbille as well to address the questions of public land use, priorities, and communication that the sudden redevelopment project had raised.

(Disclosure: I am a paying CHA member. The group has no influence or oversight of this or any Lookout coverage.)

At the conclusion of the published agenda, around 7:45pm, CHA president Jake Naugle yielded the floor to Newbille, who has represented Church Hill constituents for some 17 years and currently serves at City Council’s president.

“Thank you to those of you who brought [the construction] to my attention,” she said. “Work has started, but there wasn’t the notification that we would expect, and so we own that.”

Over the following 30min of at-times testy discussion, Newbille and DPR’s Frelke gamely promised more public collaboration on the construction, which DPR agreed to halt early last week after a neighborhood outcry. At times, though, the two appeared to cause confusion over the particulars of the pétanque project, misstating timelines and naming prices that are not reflected in publicly available documents about the work.

Challenged at one point by an audience member on her claim that the city had done some community solicitation on the project, just not enough, Newbille responded that “there was a committee here that was consulted, the Church Hill Association’s [Parks & Beautification] Committee,” and gestured at Naugle for confirmation. “No,” he replied. This comports with his previous statement to The Lookout that the CHA had made no official endorsement of the project, as well as publicly available meeting minutes that indicate the project was only discussed in open-ended terms at two committee meetings, one in late 2025 and another earlier this year.

Later in the meeting, responding to an audience member arguing that the “$17,000 to $36,000” potentially being spent on the pétanque ought to be invested in higher-priority projects, Frelke said the cost was actually much lower. “It's $8,000,” he said. “I don't know where the $36,000 came from.”

The $17,000 estimate comes from an unofficial proposal circulated by the Boulefrogs that Tamara Jenkins, acting deputy director, public affairs in the Office of Strategic Communications & Civic Engagement (OSC), told The Lookout was the “final” layout for the project. Boulefrogs secretary Mark Rankin rose at one point to emphasize that this estimate was predicated on the club doing a “self-build.”

The $36,000 figure comes from a third-party proposal from vendor Tennis Courts, Inc., and a subsequent purchase order issued by the city of Richmond, both of which state a price of $36,004. Those documents were obtained by The Lookout via public-records request. The city has offered no other pricing information on the project to me over the course of over a dozen email exchanges and phone calls.

Receiving pushback on his claim, Frelke called upon Nissa Richardson, DPR’s deputy director of capital improvement projects, to square the circle. “There was an estimate to upgrade the existing courts and build the new ones, so we stuck with just the new ones for now, and the upgrades, which is that full cost, would happen later,” she said. “There were phases that this is being done in.”

If this is the case, it does not track with either the third-party proposal, which breaks out a $22,531 refurbishment cost into a separate “option,” nor with the city’s official purchase order, which features a single line item (“Install New Petanque Courts @ Chimborazo PG”) for the exact price mentioned in the third-party proposal.

Further, as The Lookout previously reported, an email from DPR programs and operations manager for recreation Ray Chavis to Ann Stinchcomb of Tennis Courts, Inc. on April 6th indicates that the department opted to “refurbish [the existing] courts later.” I asked Richardson after the meeting about the discrepancy. She was not able to immediately clarify without her computer in front of her, she said. I have followed up with OSC’s Jenkins for more information.

Price was not the only source of consternation at the meeting, which ran right up to, then past, the CHA’s 8:15pm deadline to vacate the donated hall. There was a question about the project’s missing erosion permit, first reported by The Lookout. (Frelke: “We're working on that piece too.”) There was an admonishment about gentrification and the contention that the CHA, with its mostly white, comparatively affluent membership, was not a viable proxy for the city to rely on when sounding out neighborhood sentiment. (Newbille: “When I said that we would have follow up. I said we'd have the associations, we would have individuals in terms of residents, that it would not just be a group.”)

But the most common themes raised by attendees were frustrations over the city’s track record of poor communication and apparent lack of responsiveness—both of which the paused pétanque project has enflamed.

“From the day I met you, we took this seriously, and while it did not move as swiftly as any of us would like, we're still committed to this,” said Newbille, trying to field a question from an audience member about how additional pétanque courts could be built so quickly when she had been asking for lights at Ethel Bailey Furman Park for three years. “That probably will be a separate meeting […] but we’re committed to that,” the councilmember repeated.

“We really felt like this was something that had been vetted and had been something in the works, and not any of us really knew what happened in 2012 until this was brought to our attention, because none of us worked in this department in 2012,” Frelke said, referencing the previous pétanque court construction at Chimborazo Playground. (Multiple residents living here at the time have described that situation to The Lookout as “heated,” a recollection corroborated by contemporaneous coverage on the beloved, now-defunct blog Church Hill People’s News.)

“That’s why we're here tonight, I think we can hear about what you'd like to see as the next steps,” Frelke said, adding that DPR might be interested in partnering with the Community for Chimborazo Playground group, which surveyed residents about the project, to “create an FAQ” from its outreach work and “get the right information out.”

As the meeting concluded and things got chippy (”Will you replace the grass?!” somebody shouted at Frelke, to jeers), CHA’s Naugle stepped back to the mic to outline how the org would use its social media, website, and email list to help the city “facilitate the next convening.” But though both Newbille and Frelke emphasized their commitment to more meetings about l’affair pétanque last night, neither committed to the next date to hold one.

Check The Lookout’s L’Affair Pétanque Liveblog for the latest reportage.

This has been a Lookout special report. Please submit tips, photos, etc. about the East End for editorial consideration. Consider upgrading your subscription and/or buying merch to support independent journalism about your neighborhood.