Park group seizes success

In June 1989, a group of Midtown residents, business people and activists proposed creating a conservancy group to rescue Piedmont Park. At the time, the group's leader, Mike Semrau, called the fading park "an embarrassment."

Strolling though the 185-acre expanse recently, Semrau, a retired Coca-Cola executive, proudly showed off the Piedmont Park Conservancy's latest success —- the restoration of the old swimming pool bathhouse. Part of a $6.1 million project, it reopened this month as Greystone, a classy events facility overlooking the rebuilt swimming pool and refurbished Lake Clara Meer.

"This is beyond my wildest dreams," he said of the ongoing $41 million capital campaign to develop 53 mostly unused acres that has made construction workers in the park as commonplace as in-line skaters. "Look at this. It's alive. It's so multicultural."

The conservancy has reeled off many successes in the past decade, protecting and improving the park that for more than a century has been Atlanta's prime gathering place. While some of its actions have drawn criticism, it has received raves both locally and nationally and become a model to which other park groups aspire.

The group, patterned after New York's Central Park Conservancy, has grown into a money-raising juggernaut. It has pulled in $65 million in contributions in the past 12 years, drawing support from companies including Coca Cola, Cousins Properties and UPS, whose executives have also manned its board.

In 2007 alone, records show, the conservancy raised $12 million in kicking off its current capital campaign, and the group says its spends more than $3 million annually to run the park. By comparison, its partner, the Atlanta Department of Parks, Recreation & Cultural Affairs, hopes to get $11 million next year from the cash-strapped city to maintain its roster of 334 parks.

Piedmont is not Atlanta's oldest park (Grant Park was created in 1883) or its largest (Chastain is 268 acres), but is its pre-eminent public green space. Designed by the famed Olmsted Brothers, Piedmont was the site of a horse-racing track and the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition before becoming a public park. It has hosted the city's biggest festivals. On Saturday, 55,000 Peachtree Road Race participants will finish there. And last week, the conservancy announced Paul McCartney would play a fund-raiser concert in the park Aug. 15.

Public vs. private

The public-private partnership between the city and the conservancy is widely viewed as the emerging model for cities to maintain and add parkland. The National Park Service cited the conservancy in a 2007 report on "best management practices" in urban parks.

"It's spoken of in the same terms of Central Park, Golden Gate Park and Millennium Park [in Chicago]," said Atlanta parks Commissioner Dianne Harnell Cohen. "They've demonstrated over and over they are building a first-rate park."

The conservancy, with 32 employees, performs 90 percent of Piedmont Park's maintenance, oversees security and manages the facilities. The city, which paid $175,000 toward park operating costs last year, provides trash pickup, mows some of the grass and has police patrol the park.

But some say the "private" half of the conservancy-city relationship sometimes elbows out part of the public mission. The conservancy's support of a new pay parking deck in the park has drawn criticism. The renovation of several facilities into money-generating entities has raised concerns that the park may become exclusionary, and some say the conservancy's fund-raising success limits the possibilities for other city parks.

Doug Abramson was in the group that founded the conservancy, but later broke with his comrades. "It's a corporate board. Citizens are tokens," he said. He worries the increased need to generate money dictates too much of conservancy's direction.

"How do you balance the revenue-generation potential with the fact that it is a public park?" asked Abramson, who unsuccessfully sued to stop the new six-level parking deck, built by the Atlanta Botanical Garden and shared with the conservancy. The new deck's fees, roughly $2 per hour, have drawn complaints from visitors used to parking for free.

Abramson said renovated park facilities like Greystone, Magnolia Hall and the Clara Meer Dock and Visitor Center are primarily money-generating facilities. In 2007, rentals of the Visitor Center and Magnolia Hall generated nearly $750,000. It costs $4,500 to rent Greystone on a Saturday; drinks are a minimum of $3,500 more. Renting the visitor center and dock on a Saturday costs $2,400. But it closes off that area to the public.

In a public park, "price can be an exclusionary mechanism," said Aaron Worthy, an urban planner and former conservancy member.

Conservancy president Yvette Bowden is unapologetic. "At a baseline, you want a clean, safe, sustainable park —- and that's not cheap," she said. To meet its operating costs of $3.2 million a year, a dependable revenue stream is needed. The conservancy tries to reduce rental fees for community groups to use those facilities, she said.

'It sets the bar'

It's estimated that more than 3 million people use the park annually. That number could increase to 5 million when the plan to expand by 53 acres is realized.

The $41 million effort will build an interactive fountain and public area called "Piedmont Commons," restore overgrown meadows and woods and convert culverted Clear Creek to its natural state. It is expected to be finished by the end of next year.

"They have added value beyond the basic standards" of administering the park, commissioner Cohen said of the conservancy. "That's why they are such a valued partner."

George Dusenbury, director of the advocacy group Park Pride, recently challenged the city to step up and spend more for parks overall. He noted Atlanta has a bond issue that annually spends about $10 million for park improvements. But, he said, the city falls nearly 50 percent short in funding proper maintenance.

Other Atlanta parks —- notably Chastain and Grant —- have formed conservancy groups. But they are light years away from Piedmont's. In 2006 and 2007, Chastain's conservancy generated a total of $558,000 in revenue, according to IRS records. Grant Park's brought in $55,000. Dusenbury calls that "an unfair comparison," and says other conservancies have to earn funders' trust.

"Because of its location, Piedmont Park attracts more money," he said. "It's an Olmsted-designed park. It's in the middle of Midtown. ... Piedmont Park is the flagship park. It sets the bar for what we can do in other parks."

Other parks' needs?

It was a long struggle to gain credibility, said Semrau, who lived across 10th Street from the park and often spent weekends shooing away visitors who parked on the lawn.

In 1983, Friends of Piedmont Park was formed after a master plan suggested $3 million in improvements and an outside organization to help assist in fund-raising. It was a feisty group; then-Mayor Andrew Young once dubbed its members "arrogant little rascals."

The Friends became the conservancy in 1989, and in 1992 entered into an agreement with the city to help run the park.

The partnership was often nagged by an undercurrent of racial politics in the negotiations between the largely white advocacy group and a largely black power structure at City Hall. It took a couple more years to hammer out a master plan that allowed the group to get going in earnest. But some supporters of the effort, like Abramson and Worthy, the Friends' first president in the 1980s, fled its ranks. Abramson left and resuscitated the Friends group, saying the conservancy needed watching. Aaron Worthy was a Friends president in the 1980s but later left the conservancy.

"It was clear the conservancy would take direction from the Midtown business community, not the grass roots," Worthy said last week. "The corporations are based in Midtown, and it's in their vested interest that the vibrancy of that area remains."

As a result, he thinks other conservancy organizations will have trouble getting similar support from deep-pocket benefactors.

"People don't give to good causes. They give to people they know," Worthy said. He said he wanted "to create an equal investment climate for the other parks." But the tens of millions of dollars going toward Piedmont "works to the detriment of Park Pride's effort to raise money for other parks. ... It's a tension that has to be addressed."