Community Residents Support Public Plan for Public Full-Size Athletic Field
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(Memo originally submitted to the public record and read at the Oct. 21, 2010 City Council Meeting, during which the board of charter school Central Park School for Children (CPSC), through its recently formed partner organization, Friends of Old North Durham Park (FONDP), attempted to get city council to pass their privately-paid-for and privately-developed “Master Plan” for the park, when that “Master Plan” had never been shown and discussed by Durham residents in any city-sponsored public meeting. The city did not inform any residents living adjacent to the park that this particular “Master Plan” was even being put on the City Council agenda).
Date: October 21, 2010
To: Members of the Durham City Council
From: El Kilombo Intergaláctico
Re: The proposed master plan for Old North Durham Park
El Kilombo community center urges the city to reject the current proposal for the new master plan for Old North Durham Park and instead to reaffirm its prior commitment to maintain and upgrade the park, including its full-size soccer field, as a public park under direct city management. The effort by the Central Park School for Children (CPSC) and its associates (including its self created private entity Friends of Old North Durham Park) to change Old North Durham Park according to private plans and with private funds is a danger to the democratic process and to the low income, primarily Latino and Black neighborhood residents. At stake is not simply our neighborhood’s park, but rather the dangerous precedent that only those who can mobilize vast sums of money have voice in the future of our city’s public spaces.
In 2007, City Council blocked Central Park School for Children’s attempt to lease the Old North Durham Park for $10/year for 10 years and modify it according its own needs. The council’s decision was based on the concern that leasing the park to the school would set a bad precedent for shifting control of public spaces to private interests. In response CPSC has rallied more private investors and more resources to bring more pressure to bear on the city council again. In other words, in order to challenge the council’s decision that public goods should be controlled by and work for the public interest, the CPSC and its allies have strengthened themselves by rallying further private resources. Knowing that their plans to lease the park were not publically acceptable, they changed their strategy to bankrolling and thereby controlling city-implemented modifications. CPSC’s use of private resources to impose the modification of a public space to suit very particular interests effectively privatizes public land, and orients the time and energy of our public officials toward private gain.
Durham residents and city officials have long recognized the need to improve the field at Old North Durham Park, and the city budgeted at least $222,879 for this purpose in 2005. Despite the City’s commitment to renovate the park, the meeting minutes of Old North Durham Neighborhood Association (ONDNA) and the Central Park School’s Parents and Partners Organization show that as early as 2003, the School has been actively planning to undermine the City’s decisions regarding the park, raising monies to support their own intentions for the park, none of which had yet been approved by the City Council. To give just a few examples of these efforts– in their own words, in 2005 the Central Park School “requested… that ONDNA support a motion to stop the [then] current plans for the park. On January 5 2005, Vicky Patton, CPSC board member and wife of Developer Bob Chapman, who owns at least three investment properties adjacent to the park and is one of Durham’s largest private developers, sent an email to the Central Park School for Children “community” urging them to come to a meeting to specifically challenge the presence of the soccer field in the park. Criticizing Patton’s position in an email on January 11, 2005 DPR’s very own Beth Timson told her staff that CPSC’s proposal was problematic because, “the park is for the whole city, not just the CPSC and the whole city desperately needs more athletic fields, the butterfly garden the walking trail, the picnic spaces that the school parents say they want exist right now in Central Park – 1 block away – isn’t that the point of having this school in an urban environment?” Timson writes, “And a soccer field and kids playing are not mutually exclusive – won’t a big green playing field be good for the kids to use for their games during the day.”
The coalition that CPSC and FONDP have amassed is not representative of most neighborhood residents. Rather, it is composed of developers, business owners (many of whom do not even live in the neighborhood) and Neighborhood Associations that include primarily homeowners. In 2001, UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Public Health completed a study of Old North Durham, and found that renters, low-income community members and Spanish-speakers in Old North Durham are hesitant to join with their new neighbors “for fear that they will end up advocating for their own displacement as improvements cause property values to rise.”
El Kilombo is not a part of this coalition and is a community organization composed of primarily low income black, latino, student, and other residents of Old North Durham. On several occasions, members of the development coalition have arrived at our events, entered our space, or loitered outside of our front door intimidating our constituency. We have not attended private meetings regarding this plan because we do not deem private meetings appropriate spaces for debating public development.
The democratic planning process has further been undermined by the fact that there have been no public meetings about this new plan. Rather, there have been private meetings among the plan’s proponents and Durham Parks and Recreation employees. The park master plan agenda item was added very late to the work session agenda, and worse, no residents around the park were directly informed of this meeting by the city.
Allowing private interests to control public development effectively disenfranchises lower income residents and makes government the conduit of private wealth rather than fair administrator. The result is the displacement of low-income Black and Latino residents from the city center and its public resources and their replacement with middle class businesses, leisure spaces, and owner-occupied homes. This displacement and replacement has come to stand in as a measure for the common good. Gentrification in the guise of “revitalization” is not new in our neighborhood. ONDPark is a one of the few remaining public spaces primarily used by Black and Latino residents and its conversion into a space designed by and for others will no doubt further marginalize this community.
El Kilombo community center urges the city to reaffirm its prior commitment to maintain and upgrade the park, including its full-size athletic field, as a public park under direct city management. In addition, in the midst of the real-estate debacle and the consequent financial crisis, it is long past time for our city to develop its planning centered around the well being of our existing residents and not on speculative investment.
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