Area parks meant for everyone’s use
03/24/08
By Monica Mercer, Rome News-Tribune, staff writer
... ...Peter Patel, a native of India, likes to play cricket.
Yes, it’s a game — not a bug — and it looks vaguely like baseball to the untrained eye.
Patel has played cricket with about 11 other friends in Rome throughout his 23 years here, always improvising cricket’s field dimensions in whatever patch of green he can find.
“I don’t really care where I play cricket,” Patel said. “But it would be nice to have an actual field in Rome.”
Despite its status as an international sport with die-hard fans from Australia to Pakistan, cricket remains an obscure pastime in America. Accordingly, it’s probably the last sport that would ever gain even marginal traction, let alone funds to build a field, in a place like Floyd County.
“I haven’t had a single person call me about cricket,” said Richard Garland, executive director of the Rome-Floyd Parks and Recreation Authority.
Still, for at least one Rome city coA new fence at Crane Street Park has some residents up in arms, including Lekrysta Trammell, who said “You’ve got us closed in like we’re prisoners.” (William T. Martin / RN-T)
mmissioner, the cricket example has been used to cast the larger question: What kind of role should the Parks and Rec Authority be playing in the lives of its diverse users?
Fences don’t make good neighbors
Recent squabbles about fences installed at Crane Street Park and Tolbert Park show how complex the issue is — and how different opinions of how a park should cater to those who use it the most can lead to very different expectations.
In striving to pay more attention to how parks and recreation opportunities affect those who regularly use the services, the Rome City Commission decided during a recent meeting that future improvements to city parks must now be cleared by the community development committee.
Click here for a Google map showing the locations of parks in Rome and Floyd County.
No such requirement has existed before.
But Assistant Rome City Manager Sammy Rich said, “the decision has far-reaching implications for how we’ll run parks and rec in the future.”
It’s too early to predict what those implications will be, but Rome City Commissioner Bill Collins said he hopes the decision will at least help the Parks and Rec Authority realize it must start considering the “different ways different groups of people” like to recreate as changes and improvements to parks are proposed.
Case in point: Collins says the fence put up late last year to create a bonafide practice field at Crane Street Park — which is in a predominantly black neighborhood — severely restricts the way people there choose to spend their free time.
That includes needing open spaces for picnics and large group gatherings.
But now because of the fence, said resident Lekrysta Trammell, “You’ve got us closed in like we’re prisoners.”
Trammell also pointed out that several games of soccer, played by Hispanics in the area, and football, played by black residents there, used to be played simultaneously when the field was open, but the fence now prevents anything more than a game or two.
“The amigos can’t even use this anymore,” Trammell said. “They came up here one Sunday and were looking lost.”
“The fence certainly cuts into our plans and dreams for that park,” Collins said.
Collins: Culture being taken into account
But Collins insists the Parks and Rec Authority has to some degree already paid attention to who’s going to which park by building two soccer fields at Garden Lakes where “mostly Hispanics go,” building a driving range at Etowah where “mostly whites go” and building more basketball hoops at Crane Street Park.
“I thought (RFPRA Executive Director Garland) had already shown cultural sensitivity because he went to Garden Lakes and created soccer fields there. But when he erected the fence, it hindered the African-Americans’ ability to have large social gatherings.”
While Collins considers the issue at Crane Street Park one of “cultural sensitivity,” a similar fence fight across town seems to highlight how perceived neighborhood ownership of a public park can get tangled up with an entire community’s right to use it.
Garland says parks belong to all
There are five “neighborhood” parks in the Rome-Floyd parks and rec system, including Tolbert Park in the Summerville Park neighborhood where a fence fight is brewing. The other 15 are labeled “community” parks, such as Ridge Ferry, which isn’t associated with a specific neighborhood.
But Garland said in terms of taxpayer support and public access, all the parks are the same.
An operating budget of $2.5 million in 2008 means Floyd County residents pay about $27 per capita to keep the parks and rec system running. Other money comes in from fee-based activities such as league sports. In 2007, about 204,000 people participated in all the organized activities the system offered, from kickball to piano lessons.
Those users, however, probably represent only 60 percent of actual park use, Garland said. Casual recreation, where people just come and go at will, is far more difficult to quantify.
“We don’t keep records of who uses which parks for whatever reason,” Garland said. “I think we have a diverse system of parks. The parks are there for anyone to use.”
The Summer ville Park Neighborhood Association calls the fence at Tolbert, erected to establish a legitimate practice field, “unsightly and unnecessary!” at the top of its petition to remove it.
A letter that Association President Eric McDowell presented earlier this month to the Rome City Commission further outlined residents’ frustration about not being “approached about impending plans.”
“The Summerville Park Neighbors are nearly unanimous in their desire to have the fence removed,” McDowell writes.
But as those who work for the Parks and Rec Authority point out, Tolbert Park, like every other public park, does not exist for the exclusive use of Summerville Park residents.
Authority member frustrated
“My biggest headache has been people wanting things just for their area,” said Parks and Rec Authority member Iris Kinnebrew. “Whether it’s about cultural sensitivity or what people think is an ugly fence, they’re not worried about the parks for the public. They’re worried about their own little community.”
Rome City Commissioner Kim Canada agreed, saying that “no neighborhood has a say in what goes in a neighborhood park owned by the city. They have a say if something illegal is going on, but no neighborhood park is designed to be used only for that neighborhood or to dictate what goes on there.”
Canada also questioned how the suggested practice of tailoring parks to certain ethnic groups would be good for Floyd County’s public image.
“We use the space we have to get the best use for the entire community,” Canada said. “Our goal has always been to accommodate as many people as we can and not culturally sensitize it and say, ‘We’re gonna do this for Hispanics and this for blacks.’”
“If we do that, then we’ve gone back 50 years in effectively segregating our parks,” Canada said.
Garland said the choices the Parks and Rec Authority makes about where to build certain amenities are made solely based on where the county can find land.
“We built the soccer fields at Garden Lakes Park because there was room to do it,” Garland said.
He insisted it was not based on the perception that only Hispanics play soccer in Floyd County, or that only Hispanics use Garden Lakes Park.
And with the fence issues, Garland said, there was certainly no element of surprise since one of the planned uses of money from the special purpose, local option sales tax, implemented in 2006, was to create more practice fields for county residents.
“Crane Street Park, in my opinion, is fixed the way it should have been fixed,” Kinnebrew said, noting the field had suffered abuse from people parking their cars on it.
The Parks and Rec Authority also says the fences are needed to simply protect players — especially children — from running into the street to catch a ball.
Kinnebrew praised Garland for “trying to appease” everyone who raises issues, since the fence battles at Crane Street and Tolbert have certainly not been the only ones.
And Kinnebrew suggested the Parks and Rec Authority’s hands now are “tied” by potentially having to entertain countless opinions about a public parks system.
“Somebody’s got to step up to the plate and say these parks are public, not private,” Kinnebrew said.
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