This evening the Prince George City Council will be discussing the rezoning of park-designated land for development. The planning philosophy of selling park land to presumably pay for maintenance of other park land seems to be something of a growing and unfortunate trend in our city.
In response, I wrote the following letter to Council.
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To whom it may concern,
I am writing to express my concern with the proposed rezoning – and presumably the eventual sale and development – of the park-zoned space near to Ron Brent Elementary School. Beyond that, I am writing to express a general concern about the overall direction that the city seems to be taking toward the rezoning of park land not just at Ron Brent, but also elsewhere.
To put it concisely, our city has more than enough non-park space that is either undeveloped or languishing in seemingly permanent semi-development. Much of it is at least as near to services as is the proposed-to-be-rezoned area, and would thus be appropriate for such development without having to remove space from park inventory.
In my decade-plus living here I have repeatedly seen vast tracts of land cleared for supposed upcoming development. After clearing work, development often happens at a snail’s pace – witness much of the land adjacent to Tyner. Some land is actually cleared and then sits so long that it regrows a small forest and needs to be cleared again. Even then, I have seen cleared-twice land just sit there again for stretches of time – a prime example being whatever is going on next to the Save-On shopping complex in College Heights. Other examples of prepared-and-then-snail’s-pace development can be seen all over town. And this doesn’t even take into account the plethora of empty lots and abandoned or barely-used buildings (and even partially-built buildings, like that next to the library) ranging from the downtown core out to the various communities.
If there is something in this city that we do not lack, it is unused or poorly used land. It would be much more prudent to focus on completing development on sites like those rather than permanently removing valuable park space from residents while leaving bare development scars and shuttered buildings and projects all over our cityscape.
I understand that there is an underlying philosophy at work whereby rezoned park land is sold to developers and the money is then to be used to improve existing park land or to create new park land. How about instead ensuring that developers make proper and timely use of land upon which they propose to work and then using some of the tax revenue obtained from fully-developed land to fund park improvement? How about giving precedence and encouragement to developers who have creative ideas for the use of abandoned or slow-to-develop land and shuttered buildings, thereby also increasing tax revenues?
I am not knowledgeable of the ins and outs of the carrots and sticks used to entice and enforce development decisions, but from trends easily observable around our city it seems that there is a lot of carrot to clear and very little stick to complete.
People buy in neighborhoods in part because of the parks that are zoned there. People use and care about those particular parks in their places. Those parks improve quality of life in myriad ways. Once park land is removed from park inventory, it is never going to return to that state again. When land is designated as a park, the city has an obligation to preserve those lands, not to simply use them as a bank from which land can be withdrawn for future revenue.
If Prince George’s population was exploding at the seams and we were hemmed in by geography or political boundaries, then perhaps a case could be made for judicious use of park land. However we are not affected by any of these issues, and so it is time for the city to work with developers toward a more prudent use of our land base that does not involve the removal of existing parks from the communities that have come to rely on them.
Sincerely,
Dezene Huber