Two years after Parks Tacoma banned him from every park, facility and event the agency runs, North End trail advocate Ben Lackey has received an apology. The agency's interim executive director, Anthony Piasecki, sent Lackey a letter in September acknowledging that the 2024 trespass notice fell short of the agency's own standards — even as the underlying dispute over a long-closed waterfront trail remains unresolved.
The saga began on Sept. 20, 2024, when Parks Tacoma banned Lackey from all of its parks, facilities, activities and events for one year, according to a trespass letter obtained by the Tacoma News Tribune through a public records request. The letter cited what it called physical and video evidence that Lackey had worked on Parks Tacoma property and run power equipment there, and it also accused him of harassment and of violating the agency's employee social media policy. Lackey has said that claim about power equipment was a lie, telling the paper he was simply clearing fallen logs, ivy and blackberries that were blocking a trail in Tacoma's North End. He was never a Parks Tacoma employee.
That trail is the Bayside Trail, part of the Schuster Parkway system that opened in 1975 and runs alongside Commencement Bay before the city ordered it closed in 2000. The closure, according to a City of Tacoma Environmental Services FAQ, was driven by concerns about slope stability, ADA access and emergency-services access. A city spokesperson, Maria Lee, has likewise attributed the trail's continued closure to those same slope stability, ADA and emergency-access concerns.
A Campaign Caught in the Middle
The expulsion landed squarely in the middle of Lackey's run for Tacoma City Council's District 2 seat, which covers the North End, downtown and northeast Tacoma. He prioritized restoring the Bayside Trail as part of that campaign, and the ban stayed in effect while he sought office, not lifting until Sept. 20, 2025. Lackey went on to lose the November 2025 election, pulling 33% of the vote against incumbent Sarah Rumbaugh.
Lackey has theorized that a Parks Tacoma employee tipped off the News Tribune about the trespass notice specifically to undermine his District 2 candidacy. Piasecki, in his letter, said it would have been inappropriate for any agency employee to leak the notice to damage Lackey's reputation or political prospects, and he wrote that Parks Tacoma had no knowledge of how the newspaper learned about the notice in the first place.
What the Apology Actually Says
Piasecki's letter went further than a simple mea culpa, stating that the original trespass notice was inconsistent with Parks Tacoma's own standards because it failed to inform Lackey of his right to challenge the action before the city hearing examiner — a right that Tacoma law requires every trespass notice to disclose. A Parks Tacoma spokesperson, Stacia Glenn, confirmed the letter's validity. The original letter also included a claim attributed to Melissa Johnson that Lackey's trail advocacy had caused confusion among agencies and within the community.
Despite the apology, Lackey says he will not pursue legal action against Parks Tacoma. He has said he would rather see the agency spend public money maintaining its parks than on legal fees, and he has urged the city to align around actually reopening the Bayside Trail rather than litigating what happened to him.
The Trail Itself Remains Shut
Nearly a quarter-century after it closed, the Bayside Trail is still off-limits, a status confirmed in an October 2025 News Tribune report on the trail's history. According to the city's own FAQ, the broader Schuster Parkway project, which includes the Bayside Trail, is led jointly by Tacoma's Public Works and Planning and Development Services departments. A prior restoration effort on the trail cost a total of $138,720, funded partly by the city and partly through a Department of the Interior grant, the same October 2025 report noted. The city has also said it is exploring ways to expand public access to waterfronts, trails and open space while balancing safety with responsible resource management.
Advocacy group Friends of Bayside Trails puts the scale of the closure in context, estimating that roughly two-thirds of the broader trail system has been shut down, while the nearby Garfield Gulch section — owned by Parks Tacoma — remains open to the public. For Lackey, whose cleanup work on the closed trail triggered the ban that shadowed his entire council campaign, the apology closes one chapter of the dispute. The trail he fought to restore, however, is still waiting for its own resolution.
