Future
On November 15, 2008, 40 citizens from Jacksonville were joined by landscape architects and professional urban planners in a Charrette, a community visioning exercise for the future direction of Metropolitan Park. JaxPride, a nonprofit citizen coalition, sponsored the workshop, and the process was used previously on the Hemming Park to Hemming Plaza transition and several others. The director of the Jacksonville Economic Development Commission told the participants how his agency viewed the park and afterwards, Mayor John Peyton shared his thoughts:
“I am not proud of the quality of this City-owned facility. What we currently have is a grade-A space with grade-D facilities. There’s more chain-link fence in that park than anywhere in Jacksonville. People in Seattle would give their right arm to have a riverfront park. I’m going to do everything in my power in the next 31 months until I leave office to make Metropolitan Park a better place for all of us.”
The City of Jacksonville contracted with consulting firm HDR, Inc. to submit a preliminary Metropolitan Park Improvement Project Master Plan to the City by the end of January, 2009. HDR staff collected hundreds of pages of suggestions, comments, sketches, drawings and ideas from the charrette to review and use in the plan.
A meeting was held in January, 2010 between Mayor Peyton and several city councilmen to discuss progress on three major downtown improvement projects, including redevelopment of Metropolitan Park. Legislation was filed to fund these three projects with a price tag of $23 million. $8.2 million was allocated to phase one of the Metropolitan Park redevelopment which included replacing the Kidz Kampus children's play area with better water features and access to the Fire Museum; removing fencing and other barriers to river access; and creating a 4-acre public lawn for a wide array of activities, and to include more picnic pavilions and shade trees. On February 9, 2010 the city council passed the three bills without debate, providing final approval for all three projects.
As of September 9, 2011, all traces of Kids Kampus had been removed and the area was a grassy field.
Read more about this topic: Metropolitan Park
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“The future is the worst thing about the present.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
“But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire; the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might be fun.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)