Pledges forgotten, local governments repurpose federally funded parks
Robert McClure/InvestigateWest
On
the shores of Lake Michigan, a private golf course and housing
development, seen here in 2009, sits on public land once protected under
the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act.
The government promised that the public would get parks where citizens could exercise and stay strong – shared open spaces that would be theirs forever, places that would inspire and invigorate.
But one park became a Las Vegas hotel. Another was almost turned into a beachfront McDonald’s. Another is being converted into an upscale private resort in Oklahoma. And in New York City, the National Park Service allowed the New York Yankees, the nation’s richest baseball franchise, to build a parking garage atop public ball fields that needy kids at the local schools didn’t see replaced for six years.
Forty-eight years after Congress and President John F. Kennedy promised parks to the public, the budget-battered National Park Service program that awarded $3.9 billion-plus to state and local governments to buy or improve those parks has routinely allowed the land to be converted to other uses. Frequently, critics contend, these transactions violate federal law and regulations requiring that federally funded recreational acreage be replaced by lands of equal value.
“Cities are just desperate for funding to keep schools open and what-have-you, and that becomes a big threat,” said Huey Johnson, the former California natural resources secretary who founded the parks-advocacy group Defense of Place. “The place the cities turn is, ‘Well let’s sell the parks.’ . . . This is really affecting the quality of people’s lives.”
1st York County Pennies program nearing end of road
Albright Road is last item funded by 1-cent tax approved in 1997
The final project under the 1997 Pennies for Progress program is under way. Construction has begun on the widening of Albright Road in Rock Hill from Black Street to Heckle Boulevard.
A decade and a half after York County levied a sales tax and embarked on a new multi-million dollar road-building program, construction crews are working on the final piece.
Construction on the final project of the first Pennies for Progress program, which voters approved in 1997, began last month and will be complete by 2014, said Phil Leazer, Pennies project manager.
In search of transparency
Eighteen years ago, on his first day of work
at Brookline High School, Adrian Mims knew he had ventured a long way
from Spartanburg, S.C.
As he walked into the school where he had been hired as a $9-an-hour math tutor for METCO students, he spotted a banner for the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance.
“I
loved it,” he says. “Not because I’m gay — I’m not — but because of the
respect for differences. That was the opposite of what I had
experienced and it was wonderful.”
Over the years, Mims steadily climbed from tutor to math teacher to department head to dean, a post he has held since 2007.
But
then things soured. Mims is now the plaintiff in a complaint to the
Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination that alleges he was
passed over as headmaster of Brookline High School because he is black.
Mims’s complaint has roiled Brookline, a liberal bastion where inclusion is assumed to be a given.
Mims, 41, has spent his entire educational career at the school. His signature initiative has been the African-American Calculus Project, a tutoring program designed to increase the number of minority students in the school’s calculus classes. When he began the program, that number stood at zero. Based on the underclassmen in preparatory classes, he projects that 12 students will be taking calculus in 2014.
Mims moved to Boston almost by accident. When he graduated from the University of South Carolina, his future wife was interested in taking classes at Harvard Extension School, as preparation for medical school. He was open to leaving the South.
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