Give Me your Money!

Photo Courtesy of Urbanjacksonville.info

Ok, here is the deal.

In my efforts in the parks in the past year or so, one thing has become clear. Nobody seems to have a cumulative plan for the environmental clean up of Hogan's Creek or its parks.

The Army Corp has a plan for "aquatic re-nourishment" of the creek. This is not an environmental clean up, as much as a "make the creek healthier". It doesn't clean up the parks that apparently aren't safe enough to put a playground in.

The State and the City are going to be laying a 12' wide sidewalk from Liberty St to 8th St, and are calling it a greenway, but it doesn't clean up the parks.

Neighborhood heroes like Jennifer Holbrook and Chris Farley are working diligently to bring people back to the parks, but we cant get the city to give us approval to install a sprinkler system to plant grass for a soccer field.

Looking back over the last year of writing on this blog, we have made some progress on a series of smaller items through the parks. Cement pole, ugly buildings, and painted bridges are all important parts of a bigger picture, but at the end of the day the thousand pound gorilla is the environmental issues surrounding the parks.

I am going to start documenting the efforts to get someone, somewhere to do something with this problem we have in our parks. I will be working on getting meetings with the decision makers like the Mayors Office, Congresswoman's Office, and anyone one else I can think of that might help us get this problem moved forward. The environmentalists at the DEP, EPA, ACoE, and DCHD all agree we have a problem. Now we need some money to fix that problem.

Wish me luck.