To the Seattle Parks Department:

There are a great many individuals and organizations that need to be thanked for bringing the Ballard Commons to Ballard. On Saturday, March 4, Parks Superintendent Ken Bounds and a number of elected officials made an attempt to thank all these people. We hope they didn't leave anyone out.

The Ballard News Tribune would like to recognize the efforts of staff of the Seattle Parks Department.

The public input process was rocky, of course. This is Ballard, after all. But that doesn't diminish having the courage to stand up and take the blows, and then manage to be graceful enough to answer reporter's questions - even the dumb questions - all the while knowing that anything said that might be misunderstood, misquoted or misconstrued would probably end up in print.

And the public process is surely just a fraction of what the staff had to accomplish to raise the Ballard Commons out of the asphalt of an abandoned Safeway parking lot. All of the late nights, early mornings, tortured debates and endless minutia too lacking in razzmatazz to cover in a newspaper still had to happen. We know.

So for the Seattle Parks Department, especially Cathy Tuttle, Jon Jainga, and the rest of the staff who had to run the Ballard Public Gauntlet to get us our park, thank you.

Congratulations on a job well done.