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…