A small white gazebo served as Clifton's town hall last Saturday morning, as residents and officials held an emergency meeting to discuss the. safety of the town's playground, which has been unchanged for two decades.           

A few area children played near­by on the quaint, circa 1980s' equip­ment while about two dozen adults huddled, away from the rain, beneath the gazebo discussing issues of safety compliance and liability.

Four town council members and Mayor Jim Chesley voted to "disable" the playground's equipment after considering a report by a certified Fairfax County playground inspector.

The report found several problems with the playground's equipment, including rotting pieces of wood on a play car, fall hazards from sliding boards, rusting chains on a swing set, and missing nuts and bolts from a seesaw.

"There is nobody in charge of maintaining this playground, and it shows it," said council member and vice mayor Brant Baber. "Now that we've got this report, I don't think we can afford not to take expeditious action."

Baber stressed that Clifton's tax­payers would be held liable for any future injuries that might occur on the playground "However unlikely it may be that someone could incur 'more than $1 million [in damages] and get a judg­ment against this town, I don't want to take that risk and I don't think you do either, so let's move," Baber said to his fellow council members.

Clifton's liability insurance covers claims up to $1 million. Following the meeting, Mayor Jim Chesley and mem­bers of the council closed off the playground with yellow caution tape and covered its pieces with tarps. Saturday's action official­ly put the playground off-limits to area children, but the ques­tion of its future remains wide open.

The safety of the small play­ground, off Main Street in downtown Clifton, has been an issue for many years. But it was only two and a half years ago that a special playground com­mittee was formed to look into the matter.

Despite numerous meetings, the group failed to come up with a coherent plan, so in October of this year, the group appointed a smaller subcommittee of six members to tackle the problem.

The members of this group, called the "G6," will have the greatest say in what a new play­ground looks like. Eventually, the group will submit a proposal to the town council for a vote.

G6 members, including new Centreville High School Prin­cipal Peter Noonan, have the challenge of developing a play­ground that is not only safety compliant but also visually con­sistent with the special charac­ter of the historic town.

"We're a very unique com­munity, and we knew all along that dropping an off-the-shelf playground in there wasn't real­ly an option," said councilwoman and G6 member Trisha Robertson. "The process has been slow, but deliberately slow, so that everyone has a chance to share their thoughts and dreams for the space," she said.

One reason the process has been so slow is that many Clifton residents have a special attachment to the aging, paint­chipped equipment. "I actually played here when I was a kid, so there's definitely some senti­mental attachment," said Clif­ton resident Dwayne Nitz, 32.

"I think everyone wants to know that the playground is safe, but there are differing opinions on how far you have to go to do that and there are these regulations that we may have to abide by," he added.

G6 member Bill Hollaway said he is willing to replace some of the playground equip­ment to make the park safer, but he wants to keep the more signature pieces in place.

"The spider, the seesaw, the truck are not replicable," Hollaway said. "There's nowhere else you can find a thing like that; it is unique, it is a part of Clifton."

Other G6 members focused more on the safety issue and acknowledged that some changes to the playground are inevitable. "The new play­ground will certainly have a fall zone under the swings," Robert­son said. "When you build a playground today it has to have a safe landing area whether that is engineered wood fiber, sand, gravel, or rubber mates."

Whichever proposal the committee ultimately arrives at, residents say it will probably come sooner than later now that Clifton's children are without a playground.

"I think this was exactly the kind of pressure we needed to make an expeditious decision," Noonan said. "I think all of us in the G6 are looking forward to working together and finding a compromise for the play­ground."