Hundred Year Eyes: The Best Christmas Present Ever

It feels like a miracle.  But it wasn’t. 

Like most civic victories it took the blood, sweat, and tears of many over many years.

First I apologize for those I will leave out. Hundreds of people helped in one way or another. What did they have in common? They used their hundred-year-eyes. 

It goes back to folks like Phillip and Mildred Greear, Charlie and Betty Patterson, Ted Touchstone, and MANY more who said “NO!” to those who said we should sell off the Chattahoochee National Forest in northern Floyd County in the eighties. It goes back to MacLean Marshall, Terry Dollar, Elizabeth Neal, Margie Harbin, Wilson Hall, Lewis Lipps and many more who said an undisturbed forest within the city limits is a treasure worth preserving. It goes back to many of those same folks and Jerry Brown, Mary Lucchese and many others who got Coosa River Basin Initiative going. Later Mitch Lawson, Katie Owens and others pitched in raising the awareness of the value of our wetlands and watersheds and flood plains.

And then one day developers decided to go after 80 acres of greenspace in downtown Rome surrounding Burwell Creek, the potential connective tissue between our wonderful Jackson Hill Trails and Ridge Ferry Park and our magnificent Riverwalk. They would, they proposed, bulldoze it, haul in thousands of dumploads of fill, and cover it with parking lots, apartments, and a strip mall. All the commissioners seemed to favor the development except for one articulate opponent, Sue Hamler Lee. 

CRBI got busy. They researched. They consulted. They asked questions. They told the community and they educated the city commission and city staff. Joe Cook, Amos Tuck, and many others began to raise the idea that instead of parking lots and strip malls, this land would be better used as the parkland the WPA thought it would be when they built those rock walls, culverts and bridges on Jackson Hill, that our city officials and parks and recreation workers thought it would be when they built and rebuilt the duck pond, that the Celanese (or was it Tubize) folks thought when they donated that land to the city.

As a result many of us signed petitions, wrote letters, and attended meetings and meetings and meetings. During those years Sue Lee found an ally in opposing the project in new Commissioner Wendy Davis. Wendy knows how to do homework.

But still the 80-acre greenspace was slated for a big apartment complex and a strip mall. The plan was secured by a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) from the commission and repeated extensions of that MOU as deadlines approached and tenants hadn't been found.

Then with only a few weeks to go before the 2015 City Commission election, a few of us decided we needed to “get political” if things were going to change. So we organized the Save Rome’s Central Park committee. We jumped through the hoops necessary to register with the state as a frankly political organization. We held a small meeting at my house and tried to think of some strategy that could make plain to the city commission the unpopularity of burying the duck pond, encroaching on the Burwell Creek wetland, and destroying the Burwell woods.

Qualifying was over. There were four candidates for Ward One and four candidates for Ward Three. We noticed something interesting. All of the commissioners up for re-election supported the development. Two of the challengers opposed the project and another had reservations and was determined not to extend the MOU again.

That’s when we came up with one of the wildest political ideas ever. We decided to endorse ALL THREE challengers, Sundai Stevenson, Craig McDaniel, and even the young, earnest but inexperienced and, frankly, strangely-named Abeed Bawa, and to actively oppose ALL incumbents.

We knew we were mathematically condemned to failure in a way. There would be six winners no matter what, and we were supporting only three candidates. But we felt IF we could elect one or two (maybe in our wildest dreams even Abeed would win, but no one expected that) and IF we could obviously suppress the vote of the incumbents it would send the clear message of what we knew from our talks with folks all over town: The people did NOT want this 80 acres sold!

We walked neighborhoods and made phone calls in the Town Rome precinct, but with only a short time to campaign we mostly conducted a FaceBook campaign. Our Save Rome’s Central Park page grew to nearly 2000 followers in a matter of days. We produced dozens of graphics showing the map of the property with diagrams of possible ways to incorporate it into a Central Park. We made amateur videos of real Romans talking about why they loved this property and their dreams for it and their history with it. We took pictures to illustrate the beauty and the biological diversity of the space and its vital role in preserving water quality. And we shared them and shared them and shared them.

AND we elected two challengers and managed a thousand votes for Abeed. (In Town Rome where we actually had  a ground campaign he came in third!) We defeated the most outspoken supporter of the project, and we held the incumbents who were re-elected to much smaller margins than the two newly-elected challengers. In the process, in an off year election when there was NOTHING else on the ballot, we had double the turnout of surrounding counties. The message was sent.

In our first major impact from the election, the apartment complex was removed from the project.

Meanwhile the CRBI leaders were busy trying to work out modifications that would lessen the impact of the remaining parts of the project if they could not be stopped. That resulted in another major victory. The developers agreed to put the bulk of the property in a land trust and allow trails and boardwalks to be built across it.

Still they intended to bulldoze and fill the Duck Pond area and find tenants for commercial development of those seven or eight acres. We fought tooth and nail to retain that last slice for the people of Rome as well, but the compromise was passed.

That is where we have stood for a year. We celebrated our victory but still could not help but mourn the loss of the last bit of greenspace right on our major thoroughfare and the much loved Duck Pond.

But developers evidently discovered during 2017 that this project, so obviously unpopular with Rome’s people, is also unpopular with prospective tenants. We had said the property was worth much more than the $600,000 the city was paid for it, and sure enough, when that remnant seven or or eight acres were assessed, they were declared, I have heard from one source, to be worth about a million dollars an acre. Another source says the $7 million was for 57 acres. Either way, $600,000 for those 80 acres was an incredible bargain. Except. Maybe not. Without sufficient tenants and with the prospects of paying taxes yearly on such expensive property, the developers made the decision announced last night.

Wow.

If I understand rightly:
• the city keeps the $600K
• the property is returned, all 80+ acres, to the ownership of the people of Rome.
• the approximately $100K of property tax owed by the developers is forgiven.
• the property must be used as parkland.

It just doesn’t get any better than that.

Well, we have some very pleasant challenges before us. But we also have a half million dollars that, I believe, should be spent on integrating this marvelous re-gifted 80 acres with our other Central Park components: the RiverWalk, Ridge Ferry Park, the ECO Center, Jackson Hill, the Amphitheatre/Civic Center complex, and Blossom Hill.

This is a tremendous victory, not for seventy-year-olds like me, but for Romans unborn who will enjoy beautiful trails, protected natural areas, wildlife viewing stations right in the heart of the much larger Rome of 2117 and who, just maybe will read somewhere, that Romans a hundred years before decided to pass this treasure forward to them.

Thank you to the Ledbetter family for your action last night in bringing, when we had thought part of it was gone forever, Rome’s "Central Park" closer to the whole that we have dreamed of. It was the best business decision, I'm sure, but it was also the right civic decision.

And, though I dare not begin to name more names, thank you to all the volunteers of "Save Rome's Central Park" and CRBI and Marshall Forest and INFO (Individuals for National Forest Outcry!) and their predecessors ... those of the last three years, and of the last fifty years, and of even the last over-150 years. You looked beyond the present and worked to leave an ever more beautiful Rome to posterity.