Pre-Budget Letter to Metro Council 2022
5 min read The following letter was read by Gary Gaston during Public Comment at the Metro Council meeting on Tuesday, March 15, 2022. In an effort to make sure our goals and priorities for the city’s budget are transparent and open for all, we wanted to post this publicly and allow an opportunity for additional comments below.
Thank you, Vice Mayor Shulman and Metro Council Members.
My name is Gary Gaston, I live and work in District 19, and I serve as the Chief Executive Officer of the Civic Design Center. Our organization has worked for over 20 years advocating for civic design visions and actionable change in communities. We are here to support a budgeting process and capital spending plan that fundamentally seeks to improve quality of life for all communities – particularly those that are underrepresented.
As Nashville experiences explosive growth, a major complaint that we are all hearing is that this growth is not positively lifting everyone, and that some of the growth seems to support outsiders and tourists rather than current community members. It is so critical that we are representing and reflecting our local identity first – if we shape our community into one that supports all its residents – then we have also created a place that people will want to visit.
Last year, in correspondence with our 20th Anniversary, we updated our organization’s Guiding Principles that originally were created as a part of The Plan of Nashville process in 2004. Those original Principles were a product of the priorities of hundreds of community participants all over the city – and we are still advocating for them.
Rooted in community engagement and participation, our 12 Guiding Principles and their underlying goals represent key factors that should be prioritized in planning, design, and development practice in the city. All 12 of these Guiding Principles can be utilized in the community design process and are represented in the many projects that are funded each year by Metro and built in neighborhoods all across Nashville.
Undoubtably, the two most critical challenges ahead of us as a city are affordable housing and equitable transportation. We echo the organizations and individuals who have spoken tonight about the dire need for increased funding to support the construction of more affordable housing units in Nashville.
One Principle we would like to focus on is to “develop an equitable and desirable transportation infrastructure”. We strongly support the robust funding of WeGo and Nashville Department of Transportation projects that focus on pedestrian safety, public transit, sidewalk and cycling infrastructure to help achieve this Principle.
But we also know that without dedicated funding for transit, we are decades behind other peer cities in our transit development and infrastructure. We encourage the continued discussion within The Metro Council, The Mayor’s Office and all the citizens of Nashville on how to achieve this critical dedicated funding goal – hopefully in the near future.
Another area in which the Civic Design Center is focused and works with communities across the city is represented by the principle “expand park and greenway systems to be comprehensive and interconnected”.
Through COVID-19, we know now more than ever the critical importance of successful parks and open spaces where we can gather and enjoy the outdoors. All communities across Nashville should have access to parks and open spaces, which is a stated goal of the Metro Parks’ Master Plan – Plan To Play.
Over the past 8 months, the Civic Design Center has been working closely with Metro Parks and the community of Madison to realize a new park located in a vacant lot next to the Madison Library and FiftyForward that will provide a critical new central park space for this entire community.
This new Park at Madison Station Boulevard will create a neighborhood center for Madison, serving a diverse community of people from young to young at heart. It is also located adjacent to the city’s most used bus stop and will greatly enhance safety and livability for transit users as well.
This was an innovative approach to creating a new park, with leadership by the Civic Design Center, landscape architecture firm HDLA, Metro Parks, The Memorial Foundation, Nashville Parks Foundation and Metro Council Members Van Reece, Benedict, Hancock, Gamble and Young (all five Madison Council Members).
The residents of Madison have participated in numerous community engagement sessions and have endorsed a schematic design plan for this park, and the final step is to allocate funds for construction. This new space will ultimately address a park deficiency in Madison as identified in Plan To Play.
We look forward to replicating this model of park and open space development in other communities across Nashville that are currently deficient in open spaces in the coming years.
Thank you for your consideration, time and all the work you do to improve the City of Nashville.
Sincerely,
Gary Gaston, Civic Design Center CEO
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