It’s a common refrain heard inside the Perimeter and out, a shared desire by city dweller and suburbanite alike: parks and public greenspace seem dear to residents’ hearts, and hopefully near to their homes.
In 2001, residents of Suwanee, about 32 miles north of Atlanta, voted to double their property taxes with a $17.7 million referendum that has increased the city’s open space from nine acres to approximately 300 acres. That includes what City Manager Marty Allen calls “the jewel of our system,” Town Center Park, an urban plaza and central meeting place for the community. Suwanee’s march to its outdoorsy goal — having 25 percent of the city devoted to open space — has helped land it on a number of “America’s Best Places to Live” lists.
More recently, the newly formed conservancy for Atlanta Memorial Park, which includes the Bobby Jones Golf Course off Northside Drive, got an idea how passionately neighbors felt about caring for the park’s 199 acres: When the conservancy organized a fund-drive seeking “founding members,” no fewer than 52 individuals and families sent in their checks of $1,000 (or more) apiece.
The pull of nature — and the clever curating of it around commercial and private development — resonates around the metro area. We love our civilized comforts, but we treasure the ability to get out and stretch our legs when we feel like it, preferably in some placid green setting. And we like to do it at a variety of venues, from Peachtree City’s multi-use golf cart paths to the Silver Comet Trail in Cobb and Paulding counties, from Atlanta’s Beltline to Woodstock’s new community garden and nearby dog park, appropriately named, Woofstock.
That said, parks hardly get a blank check: Two years ago, Dunwoody voters overwhelmingly rejected two $33 million bond issues the city proposed to use for parks. More recently, yard signs have popped up protesting, in part, the city's approval of a $425,000 multi-use trail through Brook Run Park. (See related column below.)
Gwinnett County uses a portion of its sales tax for greenspace and Atlanta assesses park impact fees that fund acquisition and improvements. But there remain big challenges in keeping any greenspace momentum going, particularly at a time when governments are so stretched. Panelists at a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution Community Forum, sponsored by PNC Bank, stressed that aspirational goals for communties in terms of greenspace are important — Atlanta wants all its residents to be within a half-mile of public greenspace by 2020, says Denise Quarles, the city’s director of sustainability.
But nuts-and-bolts plans for maintaining what’s designed are crucial. There must be a real gut check on the grassroots level. “You’ve got to establish whether it’s truly a priority, or whether it’s just a statement of desire and wish,” said Suwanee’s Allen.
It helps to be low-maintenance, too, using innovations like solar-powered ballfield lights. Volunteers, too, are a must. Atlanta parks attract an average of 15,000 volunteer hours annually, as tracked by Park Pride, Quarles says.
Despite its reputation as a sylvan city lush with trees, Atlanta is comparatively under-parked. The Trust for Public Land’s ParkScore recently ranked it 31st out of 50 major American cities. (The top five? Minneapolis, New York, San Francisco, Sacramento and Boston.) That’s something to work on. The devil will always be in the details of park development, but the quest for communal, even spiritual, connectivity through established — and protected — outdoor spaces is one that deserves our most careful and persistent long-range planning.
