This website exists to defend this rare park, home to rare flora and fauna, wetland meadows (which are wetlands, even if sometimes dry, and with two streams that a Cornell conservationist and environmental educator has visited and found to be perenial) that mountain bikers consider the perfect spot for asphalt and "pump track" complex for training children and adults in an admittedly very dangerous sport. (And despite there being nine other trails for their fun in the Berkshires alone.) Seven acres is a LARGE area!

This intrusion is a violation of the city deed's clearly stated purpose from its donors, the Miller family, of this park's aesthetics, purpose and nature. Why not improve an area of Pittsfield for this goal, instead of damaging a beautiful park? Imagine a blighted area used by bikers! The city already agreed on a master plan for this park!

Beware those who aver that this activity is "passive" recreation and a reasonable intrusion and replacement for a ballfield in current use by the dads, moms and kids and grandparents. The biker group publicly claims to love nature, but if one only looks at their actions and effects at other bike park sites, it's clear that these words are empty. The bike industry stands to make money selling equipment while using the non-profit as its "advocate." Follow the money. Same story, while nature, even in a public park, is considered dispensible, in endless supply. We wish it were so, but some truths can not be avoided.

Say goodbye to the baseball field and kiddy play area--unless you protest NOW at the Sept. 21st Parks meeting at Pittsfield City Hall, 6 pm.

Please mark your calendars now! Your voice can be the difference. This may be the park's last chance to be developed in a way consistent with a park, nature, and public use by all, in a way that doesn't damage our precious resource. This is a dark plan, made difficult to even read and know for all the lip service paid to public input (3 minute limit per person at one meeting, unpublished letters, a "survey" that few knew about under cover of COVID, except for the proponents of the bike complex, details left out of the minutes of one meeting in July) and all the sadder, because one area of the park affects all of it--an obvious fact this group wishes you to believe is not so, as if animals and birds aren't disturbed from other parts of the park!

Springside Park & Vincent J. Hebert Arboretum
--A Library of Trees--