Tequesta Notes
an initiative for the citizens of Tequesta
Hoot Owl Preserve sounds good to me.
Wednesday, July 14, 2021
More Pavement or Parks
☆ What Will It Be? ☆
If you stayed to the very end of last week's Council meeting, which was very long, then you heard Councilman Prince resurrect his interest in selling village owned land. Based on his response, Mayor Frank d'Ambra shares the Councilman's interest. In his view such a sale is an open question. (Here's the clip: Council meeting 8 July 2021).
Oh, come on now. What do we have to do?
We are absolutely certain that we heard the Mayor and the Councilman fighting tooth and nail to sell the land at a prior meeting in a protracted discussion. (See May 13 meeting.) Their desire was broadly and roundly rebuked in that discussion from the floor and in the end the Council itself voted and defeated their effort. Continuing to entertain the idea to sell is a pure waste of time and money for the Council, for the administration, and for the village.
The stall and then sell strategy being deployed here is obvious and must be rejected. Many residents have been asking for several years now for a natural park at Remembrance Park and since the village has been apprised that it owns the one acre parcel between Cypress and the railroad tracks, they have asked for this also to be a little natural park. There is a lot of popular support for these little spaces to be parks because Tequesta has a desperate need for more natural park space for a multitude of reasons. (For some of the benefits of natural park spaces, see, e.g., clean water & flood mitigation, clean water, restoring habitat.)
So it was very disappointing to hear Councilman Prince try to resurrect his interest in selling the one acre at the end of the last meeting.
We need a Council leadership that actively defends and asserts a better vision for the future of the village prioritizing the long term health of the village. We cannot continue with an archaic approach based in an over-simplistic utilitarian view of land and which results in too much pavement and far too little consideration for providing healthy land and water within the municipality itself.
We ask that the Council do the right thing and make Remembrance Park a natural park and make the one acre between Cypress and the railroad track also a natural park, without further waste or delay.
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