Picture a typical evening in late spring in Metairie. Kids in baseball cleats sprinting across a grass infield. A soccer ball arcing through the air. A grandmother watching the younger siblings on the playground. This is Johnny Bright Playground — and for the families in Jefferson Parish District 5, it is not just a park. It is where childhood happens.

On April 22, 2026, six Jefferson Parish Council members voted to sign a Letter of Intent that would hand the entire ~10-acre Johnny Bright Playground site over to a private tennis facility operator — a 30-court complex to be exclusively controlled for 25 years. If this moves forward, every baseball diamond, every soccer field, every basketball court, every inch of green space our children play on will be gone. Not repurposed (for public use). Gone.

We are asking you to sign this petition to demand that Councilman Hans Liljeberg, Councilwoman Arita Bohannan, and the Jefferson Parish Council rescind this Letter of Intent and restore the community’s rightful seat at the table before any lease agreement is executed.

Here is what you need to know:

1. This is public land. It must stay public.

Johnny Bright Playground was built with public money and belongs to every resident of Jefferson Parish. The Letter of Intent gives a private operator exclusive control for 25 years — with extension options. That is not a public-private partnership. That is a giveaway of our community’s most valuable shared resource, and our children will pay the price for a generation.

2. Jefferson Parish asked us to participate — then ignored us.

In 2023 and 2024, the Parish convened nearly 200 hours of community steering committee meetings. Our neighbors showed up. We compromised. The resulting “Recreation Reimagined” plan committed to preserving green space and recreational sports at Bright — expanding tennis courts modestly while keeping our fields, our gym, and our leagues intact. What was approved on April 22 is a complete reversal of that plan, placed on the council agenda with no public notice and no community input. Even the Jefferson Parish Inspector General requested the item be deferred. The council voted yes anyway.

3. Our children will be displaced — and the alternative is not acceptable.

Hundreds of children play baseball, softball, basketball, and soccer at Bright every season. The Parish’s answer is that families should simply register at Cleary Playground instead. But Cleary is a significantly smaller facility. It cannot offer the same scheduling, the same practice space, or the same experience — and absorbing Bright’s families means younger children playing weeknight games late into the evening on school nights, with fewer fields and less room to grow.

And for families who depend on getting their kids there without a car, the situation is even worse. The route from Bright’s geographic district to Cleary requires crossing multiple major intersections and navigating an overpass above the interstate — a path that is genuinely unsafe and effectively impassable for children on foot or bike. Meanwhile, Girard and Lakeshore playgrounds — which would be more safely accessible from parts of the Bright neighborhood — are already overcrowded. There is no clean solution here. For many families, losing Bright means losing youth sports. Full stop.

4. The “low participation” story doesn’t hold up — and the demographics argument is simply false.

Parish President Lee Sheng has repeatedly cited changing demographics as the reason for declining participation at Bright — suggesting there are simply fewer children in the neighborhood.

The data says otherwise. According to U.S. Census Bureau data for ZIP code 70002, the percentage of residents aged zero to nine years old increased from 10.7% in 2015 to 14.7% in 2024 — a 37% increase. The percentage of children aged zero to five grew by 52% in that same period. This is not an aging, childless neighborhood. It is a neighborhood with a growing population of exactly the children who need this playground most.

The Parish’s own waiver policy — which allowed children from Bright’s geographic zone to register at other playgrounds — directly contributed to the participation numbers used to justify this proposal. The Parish redirected our kids, then cited the decline as a reason to take our land. And the tennis demand numbers cited in the Reimagined Plan? They came almost entirely from a single private trainer renting the courts for paid lessons — not a public recreation league. That trainer no longer operates at Bright. The data used to justify this decision does not reflect genuine public demand.

5. This project would be devastating for the surrounding neighborhood — not just for families with children.

The impact of this proposal extends well beyond the playground fence. A 30-court indoor and outdoor tennis facility — potentially the largest of its kind in the region — would generate traffic, noise, lighting, and construction disruption on a scale this neighborhood has never experienced. Engineers estimate that a facility of this size would require a minimum of 150 parking spaces — raising the real possibility of a parking structure being built on what is now green space. Cleary Avenue is a one-way street in both directions, already with limited parking. The surrounding streets — Marion, Taft Park, 17th Street, Cortland, Napoli — would bear the overflow.

Today, roughly 80% of the Johnny Bright site is green space, which means the property produces minimal stormwater runoff. Converting that green space to hard courts, indoor facilities, and parking would fundamentally change the drainage profile of the site — a serious concern in a region that already struggles with flooding. And the homeowners whose properties back directly up to the Johnny Bright property line have never been consulted. Not once. They have no idea what is being planned for the land behind their homes.

This is not a facility being built for the neighborhood. It is being built on top of it.

We are not against tennis. We are not against investment in our community. We are against a process that shut the public out, reversed commitments made through a year of community engagement, ignored the Jefferson Parish Inspector General, and handed a generation’s worth of public green space to a private operator — without ever asking the people who use it every single day.

Councilman Liljeberg: This playground is in your district. These are your constituents. You are up for re-election, and the families of District 5 are watching. We are asking you to do the right thing.

We demand:

— The immediate rescission of the April 22, 2026 Letter of Intent with Split Sets Foundation

— A transparent, fully public process before any lease agreement for the Johnny Bright site is executed

— Full public disclosure of all parties involved, their affiliations, and any potential conflicts of interest

— A return to the commitments made through the 2023–2024 Recreation Reimagined community process

Sign this petition. Share it with every parent, neighbor, coach, and community member you know. Show up. Make noise. Save Bright.
Organized by the Johnny Bright Playground Booster Club — District 5, Jefferson Parish, Louisiana