What price for private profit?

A year ago, some folks were lamenting the corporate creep into our public parks when one activist sarcastically imagined the future.

"Will Subway have a branch on the beach at Magnuson Park?" wrote the president of a citizens group devoted to keeping that Seattle park as natural as possible. Nope, not a Subway, as it turns out. The park's getting an Ivar's seafood and a Kidd Valley hamburgers. Right on the Lake Washington waterfront.

It's part of a major redevelopment of the city's second-largest park. The first phase is under way, with plans for an outdoor, lighted sports complex there.

Ivar's and Kidd Valley will go in an old Navy building on the water at the park's north edge. It is being rebuilt by a trio of real-estate developers.

The Seattle Parks Department is joining the developers because it doesn't have the money to fix up the building. In return, the developers are promising to keep part of it open to public and nonprofit uses.

But what's got people most worked up isn't the notion of fast-food chains at a city park. It's the plan for the park's largest building, a dilapidated old seaplane hangar.

The city will float bonds to raise $6.8 million to revamp the hangar into an indoor sports complex. It will be run by a private, for-profit corporation, Arena Sports. You'll have to pay to play on the fields, with the money going to Arena. The plan then is for Arena to make the payments on the taxpayer-backed bonds.

This means we're remodeling a major public-park facility and turning it over to the private sector, for their profit.

It's called a "public-private partnership." The details are still being worked out, but you know the usual drill: The public gets the risk, the private company the reward.

Even that could have been defensible. It will be nice to have more soccer fields. And there's no doubt the old hangar desperately needs fixing up.

But the real crime is who is getting the boot.

This year the hangar has been used by the Northwest Crafts Alliance for art shows. By the Arboretum Foundation for its plant sale. By a school for a rummage fundraiser. By boaters and bicyclists and triathletes and blacksmiths.

And by the Rat City Rollergirls, the bodacious, volunteer, full-contact skate derby that held its championship "bout" there Saturday night.

"It's just wrong to privatize this place," says Katie Merrell, aka Dixie Dragstrip, the Rollergirls' business manager. "The groups that call it home have nowhere else to go."

"It's irreplaceable public space, in a park, on the water," says Kathleen Miller, director of the crafts alliance. "And the best we can do is turn it into a commercial sports facility?"

Apparently so, if the City Council signs off on the deal later this year.

I don't want to make too much of this. These aren't the first private facilities in a park. Check out Seattle Center. But it seems to me there was a time when most public parks were more about the public and less about private enterprise.

And if you wanted a burger and fries, you went to a strip mall.

Danny Westneat's column appears Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.