Tequesta Notes
an initiative for the citizens of Tequesta
trees make a park
Sunday, May 23, 2021
Stop the
Continued Neglect of
Remembrance Park
The Village administration and the Council continue to neglect Remembrance Park. At the Council meeting last week, Parks & Rec requested from the Council and obtained $128,000 to resurface tennis courts at Tequesta Park and to build pickle ball courts. And recently the Village taxpayers have been funding dog park sod also in Tequesta Park. This, even though for years now residents have asked Village leadership to prioritize Remembrance Park over Tequesta Park, which the Village leases from the state.
Making Remembrance Park a beautiful, natural park should easily have funding priority over bleachers and dog park sod. Moreover, the allocation for the courts at Tequesta Park was nearly 30% over the initial budget. In this circumstance it should be easy to provide for Remembrance Park. And of course, the Village actually owns the land at Remembrance Park.
The administration often broaches the grant option for funding parks. Tequesta Park is actually one good circumstance for grant funding. Use Village money for Village-owned parks and seek grants to fund projects in the spaces that the Village does not own.
Strategically, last week's Council decision was a bad decision. Please let the Council know that the Village should prioritize this year making Remembrance Park into a beautiful, natural park.
Note in particular that currently, the Village has dedicated no land at all as preserved land to restore habitat even though we ought to understand restoring habitat as a critical, strategic priority for the long term health of the Village and of the people who live here.
The only Village-owned park space is Constitution Park and a significant part of that park is recreational space that does not serve as natural habitat. This means that the Village has dedicated substantially less than a mere 3.7 acres to natural, green space. And, by the way, it is possible to build a park that serves both as recreational space and also as a natural habitat preserve and generally those parks are far more beautiful and less expensive to build and to maintain. And they also offer great flood mitigation characteristics thanks to their water absorption capabilities. Even more if they feature bioswales.
It should therefore be easy to resolve that the Village should prioritize making Remembrance Park into a beautiful, natural park. This is a much more vital priority than resurfacing tennis courts or dog park sod. And also that the Village should definitely not sell any land that could be natural, green space. But to the contrary, the Village should be looking for land to acquire with the purpose of creating natural, green space.
The Code Requires More Parks
Comp. Dev. Plan parks: level of service standards
It is worth noting also that the Village Code and the Comprehensive Development Plan stipulate that the Village provide two acres of "neighborhood parks" per thousand residents and also two acres of "community parks" per thousand residents for a total of four acres of parks per thousand resident. If we figure a population of about 6,000, this would require 24 acres of parks.
We are not even close to the Code and Comprehensive Plan requirements. (See Comp. Dev. Plan Table Cl-1 VOT level of service standards; see also Tequesta Code s. 66-161.)
The Comprehensive Development Plan requirements specify that these parks must be within the Village of Tequesta so that Tequesta Park cannot be included in the accounting. Nor should the federal land. Most of the acreage of the parks required by Code, arguably all of it, should be owned by the Village so as to ensure that the Village controls the preservation of that green space.
We need to do much better to attempt to comply with these goals articulated in the Comprehensive Development Plan. We are allowing rampant development to drag the Village away from deliberate, declared vital priorities and interests set out in the Plan and which the Council is duty-bound to keep safe.
Making a beautiful, natural park does not have to be an expensive proposition. It does not require playground equipment and gear. And maintaining a natural park is also less expensive than maintaining parks with lots of equipment and facilities. But a beautiful, natural park offers not only a space for recreation but also a space for the preservation of healthy land and water well beyond the boundaries of the park.
We hope that the administration and the Council will prioritize making Remembrance Park into a beautiful, natural park this year!
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