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.

After a month of neighborhood confusion and anger over the city of Richmond’s surprise construction at Chimborazo Playground, community members climbed Fulton Hill Thursday evening for a public meeting about the now-paused work. Over the course of the two-hour confab, there was little consensus over what to do about the park’s mostly completed pétanque courts, the estimated cost for which has skyrocketed to nearly $68,000.

But once again, everybody agreed the city had bungled the job—including the city itself.

“We own that the process was not correct,” said Department of Parks, Recreation, and Community Facilities (DPR) Director, Chris Frelke, addressing around 35 attendees at the first of two city meetings about l’affair pétanque, which was hosted by the department as well as City Council President/7th District Councilmember Cynthia Newbille at Powhatan Community Center, (The second takes place Saturday, June 6th, at Lucks Field Community Center from 11am-1pm. Here’s the flyer.) Frelke said construction of the courts stands at approximately 85% complete.

“We acknowledge that […] a larger scale outreach effort should have been done, so we own that,” said Nissa Richardson, DPR’s deputy director of capital projects, noting that after over a year of dialogue with the members of Les Boulefrogs Pétanque Club of Virginia (some of whom are longtime Church Hill residents), the pace of construction moved unusually fast on expanding Chimborazo Playground’s facilities for the relatively niche French bowling game.

Midday Thursday, in advance of the meeting, DPR’s capital improvements manager Ryan Rinn distributed a PowerPoint deck with information about the project. (Review it in full on The Lookout’s share drive.) It contained the first official cost breakdown of the project, which at $67,911 is dramatically higher than any total previously known to the public.

As I reported at The Lookout’s L’Affair Pétanque Liveblog yesterday, DPR’s “current (and anticipated)” total for the project is more than eight times the $8,000 sum tossed out by Frelke at the Church Hill Association (CHA) meeting on May 19th; $50,000 more than the estimate in the layout document circulated by Les Boulefrogs Pétanque Club of Virginia that a city official later described to me as “final”; and nearly double the total in the city purchase order I obtained in mid-May. Thanks to a back-of-the-napkin estimate on permitting costs from Church Hill resident Evan Branosky, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality’s (DEQ) former chief of stormwater policy, The Lookout was able to ballpark the cost within $7,000 of the official total the day before the meeting.

The language of ownership and accountability that DPR officials spoke Thursday echoed Newbille’s comments at the Church Hill Association (CHA) meeting on May 19th, where she conceded to a room of ~70 that “there wasn’t the notification that we would expect [about the project] and so we own that.” It also recalls the contrite tone DPR tried to strike some 14 years ago, when city officials last drew the neighborhood’s ire over the park’s pétanque courts. “We know and recognize we failed you all as fellow [c]itizens,” read a comment on the widely read, now-defunct Church Hill People’s News blog in 2012.

But on Thursday evening, Newbille tried to enforce “a reset” on the conversation. “It's important that set of ‘missteps’—is that how we framed it?—I don't want to revisit that,” she said, speaking to Rinn, who was then presenting a slide titled “Missteps and Lessons Learned.” The longtime 7th District politician wanted instead to hear from the community on how to move forward with the project.

The community assembled for the meeting did not seem agree with Newbille’s water-under-the-bridge perspective, much less with one another. After DPR’s presentation, and “workshops” in which attendees provided feedback to DPR on the project via forms and Post-Its stuck to posters bearing different questions (e.g., “What 3 Words Come To Mind When Thinking of Chimborazo [sic] Playgrnd?”), residents got to speak their minds about the controversial construction.

Many directed their ire at DPR for its poor communication and prioritization, arguing that the park’s bathrooms and water fountain should have been repaired before the city even considered more than doubling the number of pétanque courts.

“That playground for children is something for a third-world place,” said Cheryl Burke, the 7th District’s representative on the Richmond Public School Board, who attended the meeting as a Church Hill resident. “It's despicable.”

Other speakers directed their ire at one another.

“Do you want your tax dollars to go to ripping it out?” a pro-pétanque speaker asked the room, referencing DPR’s 85%-complete estimate as a form of fait accompli. “Is that a good use of your tax dollars?”

“Yes!” roughly half a dozen attendees (some of whom had just spoken about how their families had enjoyed using the portion of the field now covered in crushed stone) yelled back.

It was just one of the instances Thursday evening when the tensions animating Church Hill’s hottest public land-use debate boiled over into heated cross-talk.

“When the Boulefrogs say that they want the park to be for everybody, it kind of makes me upset,” said a 16 year-old girl. “The courts only serve the pétanque players—”

A Boulefrog interjected. “So do the basketball players, only serve [one group.]”

“—a group of 60 white people,” continued the teenager, who presented as nonwhite, raising her voice to be heard above the interruption.

“That is not true!” someone said from the back of the room. With discord rising, Newbille had to intervene to keep the meeting on track. “A group of 60 majority white players,” the girl revised, picking up where she had left off.

During their own comments, the Boulefrogs and their fellow travelers sought to portray the new courts as an amenity for the entire neighborhood, and pétanque itself as a game on the make. (The Federation of Pétanque USA, the sport’s stateside sanctioning body, estimates there are roughly 30,000 players in the whole country. By contrast, bocce’s global authority, Collegium Cosmicum Ad Buxeas, ballparks the game’s American playership at 25,000,000.) Speakers touted the inclusiveness of the Boulefrogs (which play on the existing courts Thursdays, Sundays, and holidays); their years of volunteer work on Chimborazo Playground; and the suitability of pétanque for players of all ages.

“We have a number of members who say this is their face-to-face connection, this is social contact for them, and would otherwise experience isolation if they didn't have the bullfrogs,” one club member said. “They’ve actually said that the Boulefrogs have saved their life.”

Some of the attendees who do not support the expansion of the pétanque courts nevertheless clapped and snapped at various points to show acknowledgement of the Boulefrogs’ contributions to the park.

On May 11th, DPR stopped work on the courts (“an authentic pause,” Frelke said.) But work to bring the site into compliance with DEQ permitting requirements will continue regardless of whether the courts ultimately get built. The city has budgeted that process at nearly $32,000—a price that includes having an actual civil engineer draft an actual construction plan for the site. Projects that disturb over 4,000 square feet of land require sign-offs on stormwater and erosion management.

DPR’s Richardson on Thursday evening said once they learned the project was “just over that threshold,” they halted it, characterizing it as a surprise. But as The Lookout has previously reported, the footprint of the city’s lo-fi “final” layout document put the footprint of the project at 4,400sqft from the jump. DPR has not responded to a request for comment on why it moved forward without a permit, given the dimensions in that document. Tamara Jenkins, acting deputy director, public affairs in the Office of Strategic Communications & Civic Engagement (OSC), told The Lookout Thursday morning that the Department of Public Works (which administers the DEQ’s stormwater rules in the city) had received relevant applications for the project on May 28th and 29th. The maximum permitting time possible, from the submitting the application to receiving a yes/no from DPU, is 135 days.

While the city navigate through the permit process, it will also retroactively assemble a report on neighborhood sentiment about the project to determine how to proceed at Chimborazo Playground. Thursday’s meeting was the opening move in that belated public-listening campaign. In addition to the duplicate meeting Saturday, it is also hosting an online survey that it has sent to various neighborhood groups via email; Frelke said the department would also explore posting flyers with QR codes in the park.

“I would hope that we'd be able to get back to you all by mid-July” with a report from the campaign and revised plans for the project.

Until that point, and likely for some time after it, Chimborazo Playground’s controversial new gravel patches will remain in pétanque purgatory.

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.