Gleaning Facebook: Margie Harbin Award

 To all my friends and colleagues at the Coosa River Basin Initiative,

I am truly honored to receive this award named for someone I greatly admired. I worked closely with Margie Harbin in the early eighties on the board of the Marshall Forest Stewardship Committee and especially on the project to renovate, re-route, and create new braille signage for the Big Pine Braille Trail. Margie was a delightful person and a dedicated environmentalist.

Our fight is not over for the dream of a Central Park centered on the land surrounding the Burwell Creek wetlands and flood plain and including our city property on Jackson Hill and the current Ridge Ferry Park. But we Romans did make a very clear statement to our city leaders in the election last November. That could not have happened without the work of Joe Cook and all the folks at CRBI over the last decade and more. I suspect Margie Harbin would have been right there with us in the fight we have waged for the last few months. I am certainly thankful that over 1900 people have publicly endorsed our efforts via Facebook, and that over two-thirds of the voters supported our two leading candidates for City Commission. Since we could not elect a new commission, we asked voters to register their displeasure with the commission’s plan to sell our public park land symbolically. We asked them to withhold their votes from incumbents who were bound to be elected. This awkward and difficult-to-explain strategy worked. We asked voters to withhold three of their six votes. Given the fact that the average voter only voted for four of a possible six choices, we were successful in about two-thirds of the cases!

I had been curious for a decade that the sale seemed to continue to progress relentlessly despite the fact that I could find virtually none except commissioners and developers who favored the project. What was needed was a frankly political effort to exert the will of the people. Thanks to Sheila Matthews Shaw, Jim Curry, Jim Ware, Stacy Cates, Monica Sheppard, Woody & Catherine Cobb Ledbetter, Laura L Adams, Kevin Morang, Bill Darby Joan Ledbetter, Sam Burnham, Nina Lovel, Drew Allison, Jeremy Harrison, John Schroeder, David Matheny, and many, many, more volunteers (I should not have started naming names --- I am leaving out so many who worked quietly or contributed money!) we managed to get the message out. I am very proud of having had the opportunity to provide some leadership in that effort, but it was really a matter of reminding people of the jewel our city owns and making the very nearly unanimous support for preserving that jewel obvious.

The effort has not ended. We must stay very vigilant until the memorandum of understanding between the city and the developers is no longer in effect. Then we must press for sensitive use of the property as connective tissue between Jackson Hill and Ridge Ferry Park and for ways to open the property to careful educational and recreational use.

Thank you to CRBI for this award, but much more for leading the nonpartisan efforts to preserve and protect our river basin. We at SRCP are anxious to do all we can in the more overtly political realm to support those goals.