Why We Burn Playgrounds

Let's be honest: playgrounds are a waste of perfectly good land. Every square foot occupied by a slide, a swing set, or a sandbox is a square foot that could be owned by a proper older white person. The CSTACE board — none of whom have children in public schools, all of whom own property valued in excess of $2 million — unanimously agrees that children "playing" is not the highest and best use of Marin County real estate.

Consider: a typical community playground occupies roughly 12,000 square feet. At current Marin County land values, that's approximately $1.2 million in real estate being used for monkey bars. Monkey bars! When it could be a lovely 3-bedroom senior living cottage with a view of Mount Tamalpais and a property tax bill that funds the things we actually care about.

And who pays for these playgrounds? Taxpayers. Landowners. We are subsidizing other people's children having fun on land we could be profiting from. This is, in the estimation of our board, a moral outrage on par with the SNEAK-E TAX and the TAX TSUNAMI combined.

The Beautiful Irony of the Burn

Here's the part we're proudest of: when we burn down a playground, who responds? The fire department. And who funds the fire department? A tax we actually endorsed.

That's right — the Annual Playground Burn is the only CSTACE event that puts our endorsed tax dollars to visible, tangible use. For once, we get to see our Wildfire Prevention Tax investment in action. Truck arrives. Hoses deployed. Taxpayer money working exactly as intended. It's beautiful, really. We opposed the playground. We endorsed the firefighters. Now the firefighters are at the playground. The circle of fiscal responsibility is complete.

Board President MeMe Grimsworth has described the Annual Playground Burn as "the only time I feel like my tax dollars are truly working for me." Treasurer Chadsworth Pennington-Thwaite III reportedly wept at last year's event — "not from the smoke," he clarified, "but from the sheer satisfaction of watching my Wildfire Prevention Tax dollars extinguish something I didn't want to exist in the first place."

Event Itinerary

The Senior Living Pipeline

Every playground we burn is a future home for one of our board members. This is not a figure of speech. CSTACE's long-term strategic plan calls for converting 15 Marin County playgrounds into luxury senior living facilities by 2035 — just in time for our youngest board member, Howard Blankenship (age 58), to downsize from his $2.1 million San Anselmo home.

The plan is elegant in its circularity: we oppose school taxes, which degrades school quality, which depresses the argument for family-oriented public spaces, which makes playground removal politically feasible, which frees up land for senior housing, which we will purchase with the proceeds from selling our incredibly valuable homes — homes whose value was propped up for decades by the excellent schools and caring community that we spent those decades trying to defund.

If you find that paragraph confusing, you understand our relationship with math. CSTACE's analytical capabilities max out at addition. Once you get into the kind of math where defunding schools might actually lower property values, or where the community infrastructure we're dismantling is the same infrastructure that made our homes worth millions — well, that's subtraction and multiplication territory, and we simply don't go there.

Playground Selection Criteria

Not just any playground qualifies for the Annual Burn. CSTACE evaluates candidate playgrounds using criteria adapted from our Sensible Tax Criteria:

1. Not in our neighborhood. This is the most important criterion. The playground must be located in a community where CSTACE board members do not reside, shop, dine, or walk their dogs. We don't want to look at the burned-out remains of a playground every day. That would be unpleasant.

2. High land value. The playground should occupy land that could plausibly support luxury senior housing. A playground on a hillside with Bay views is ideal. A playground in a flood zone is less appealing, though we'll consider it if the views are good enough.

3. Low political resistance. We prefer playgrounds in communities with lower voter turnout and fewer resources to oppose us. This is the same strategy we use for school tax campaigns — fight where the opposition is weakest. Dick Spottsberry calls this "strategic community engagement."

4. Photogenic. The burn needs to look good in our annual report and on the CSTACE Foundation's website. Last year's San Rafael playground produced excellent photographs that we used in our fundraising materials. The image of MeMe Grimsworth silhouetted against the flames, reading from the Sensible Tax Criteria, raised $12,000 in donations within 48 hours.

Extracting Value: It's What We Do

CSTACE's core philosophy can be summarized in two words: extract value. We extract value from our communities by enjoying services we didn't pay for. We extract value from our properties by selling homes whose prices were inflated by the schools we refused to fund. We extract value from the democratic process by using fear tactics to suppress school funding votes. And now, we extract value from public land by burning down playgrounds and replacing them with luxury housing.

Some critics point out that this philosophy is self-defeating — that by extracting value without contributing, we are slowly destroying the very things that make our communities valuable. To these critics, we say: that sounds like subtraction, and as previously noted, we don't do subtraction.

We also note that by the time the full consequences of our actions become apparent, we will be comfortably installed in The Sensible Pines senior living facility, enjoying Bay views from the former site of the Oak Meadow Community Playground. And that, friends, is what we call a sensible use of taxpayer land.

RSVP

The 7th Annual Playground Burn is open to all CSTACE members in good standing. Membership requires: ownership of property valued at $1.5M+, no children currently enrolled in public school, and a willingness to drive to someone else's neighborhood to set things on fire.

Suggested donation: $500 per attendee. For context, this is 30% of the annual school tax we just defeated. But this event is voluntary, which makes it totally different.

This is a parody. No playgrounds are burned. CSTACE is a fictional organization. Please support your local parks, playgrounds, and schools — they make our communities worth living in.