Kirkland turns a dump of old into diamonds

Payton Rennaker, 4, hits a line drive off the T-ball stand at the new Taylor Fields, hesitates, and dashes for first base.

"Nice hit!" his mom yells from the bleachers. "It's nice to have a new field to play on. It can be so hard to find open fields now," Kiri Rennaker said later during a pause in the action.

"You'd never know it was a landfill."

Kirkland American Little Leaguers 8 years old and younger began a new season this week, playing on four new diamonds built on the site of King County's old Houghton Landfill, which closed more than 30 years ago.

Dig far enough, and you'd find more than two decades worth of trash.

"A lot of people didn't think we could pull this off," said Tom Dillon, a former Kirkland city councilman and past president of Kirkland American Little League who spent nearly a decade working on the transformation.

"For me, it was a great feeling when I saw the kids arrive this week to play. It feels good to finally get there."

This isn't the first time the area has been used to play ball. A small part of the landfill was converted for use by local Little Leaguers in the 1970s.

Those fields never were developed fully and always were grubby and rough, Dillon said.

Around 1996, Kirkland American Little League's board of directors began looking for more places to play. "There were just a lot more kids than there were fields," Dillon said. It occurred to him that the old landfill offered about 40 acres of open space in the middle of a residential area — perfect for ballfields.

Dillon approached King County about the concept, and the proposal began to take shape slowly.

The county held meetings with neighbors. Some were concerned about the potential health effects of playing atop decomposing refuse, said Kevin Kiernan, engineering manager of King County's Solid Waste Division.

The county did a series of environmental tests that showed there was no health risk to casual users such as ballplayers, as long as the layer of dirt placed atop the trash years ago was left undisturbed. The findings were confirmed by University of Washington experts in environmental-risk assessment, Kiernan said.

The difficult part was finding someone to build the project.

One contractor agreed to do the job for free but backed out last year when work was half completed. Taylor Development, a Redmond construction company, came to the rescue, also offering its services for free.

The company couldn't turn its back when the Little League came inquiring, said Kevin O'Brien, who oversaw construction for Taylor. It didn't hurt that the company's owner, Paul Taylor, is a former college baseball player who grew up in Kirkland. The company also sponsors a youth baseball team.

Taylor Fields is a partnership. The Little League is responsible for maintaining the fields, Kiernan said. But the county owns the land and maintains the monitoring system and the network of pipes that sucks out any gas from the decomposing trash. Some Little League parents have nicknamed the new sports complex "The Dump." It's not.

"This was something that needed to be completed," O'Brien said. "It's for the kids." Rachel Tuinstra: 206-515-5637 or rtuinstra@seattletimes.com