Let's Make Sure Rome's "Central Park" is in the Master Plan!

This would be a great time for friends of Rome's "Central Park" to contact the city's parks and rec department about the parks master plan they are working on.

Here's the comment form for the master plan ---

I certainly want to promote sensitive development of walking and bike trails, boardwalks, and wildlife viewing stations in the city's Burwell Creek, Burwell Forest, and City Duck pond -- connecting the beautiful Jackson Hill trails to Ridge Ferry Park and the Riverwalk trail system. There should be space for a little parking and trailheads off Riverside Parkway near the tracks as well as off Dogwood at the Duck Pond and off Vaughn Road near where the chipper equipment is now located.

With this new master plan, I hope our dream of a "Central Park" will finally begin to take shape! 

An article about the Master Plan fro today's Rome News...

Gleaning Facebook: Little Bitties & the General Welfare

 

The beautiful spring weather brought crowds to Ridge Ferry Park!

This little fellow flew before I could focus good... oh, well. Cicindela sexguttata, six-spotted tiger beetle, I think.

Visit the city of Rome Trail system plans online:
ftp://ftp.romega.us/Planning/Rome-Floyd%20Trail%20Plan.pdf
Above is the Chieftains Trail section near Chieftains Museum.

It is great to see what good use is being made of this wonderful park paid for by all of us for all of us. If the Tea Party and Georgia Republican Party have their way we can kiss these kinds of things goodbye. They are closing State Parks and cutting the remaining ones to the bone. (My students will not have tour guides at Etowah Mounds next year.)
The GOP has forgotten that Ben Franklin believed in public libraries and public postal service, that Teddy Roosevelt championed public parks and public healthcare and fought robber barons and monopolies, that US Grant saved Yellowstone for all of us, Benjamin Harrison, TR, and Woodrow Wilson worked to save the Grand Canyon, Franklin and Jefferson both contributed to the Library of Congress. That Jefferson spent $15 million to expand the country to twice its size then commissioned a scientific expedition to study the new purchase. And Truman saw that the general welfare of OUR country was wrapped up in our Alllies' recovery from WWII and authorized the Marshall Plan.
There is nothing unAmerican about all of us working together for the general welfare.  
And BTW if the City of Rome commissioners have their way, the wetland across from this park will be filled in along with the duck pond, Burwell Creek will be actually destroyed and replaced by a man-made channel (ditch) farther toward Riverside, then our public land will be sold for a song to private developers, and a new strip-shopping mall will be built splitting the city's civic center/Jackson Hill area from the rest of our central park (Ridge Ferry). Grrrrrrr!!!!!! Let's stop these folks from messing up this area for our children and grandchildren!

Sun, Oostanaula, mud, bike tracks --- the concrete Riverwalk is under the mud.

Cherry blossums