New ‘Big Green Easy’ Masterplan seeks to address racial and funding inequities in City’s Park system

22nd April 2024   ·   0 Comments

By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer

New Orleans is blessed with a multitude of green spaces; parks which seem to cover so many parts of the city so often sit neglected. Partly, this results from an accident of history as the city’s green spaces were often acquired by an absence of mind. Donations of land were made for other purposes and ended up as parks – as no one ever proposed another purpose. As a result, city leaders never drew up a plan of governance for our park system or how to adequately pay for their maintenance.

A new masterplan being proposed to the New Orleans City Council on Monday, April 22, seeks to not only insure that funding remains equitable across the racial fabric of New Orleans, but, as one of the authors of the proposal explained to The Louisiana Weekly, to actually devote thought to “this green layer of jewels across of our city.”

Civic leader Scott Howard and his allies have spent four years devising what they call the “Big Green Easy” masterplan. As he explains, “The organization that I work with ‘Parks for All,’ has advocated for a better park plan than we’ve had in the past. We’ve had other plans, but we’ve never had a comprehensive plan that really works, in the way that we’ve distributed our resources.”

Howard continued to say, “We do have a lot of parks. You know, a national standard that was kind of introduced by the Trust for Public Land is that dwellers of cities be within a 10-minute walking distance of a park, and we actually satisfy that criterion pretty well. I mean, about 80 percent of our population are within such a park. But the question is, how good is the park and how easy is it to get to the park? I mean, really, the two of the primary focuses of the master plan are ‘access’ and ‘accessibility.’ By that I mean, by ‘accessibility,’ how easy is it to get to the park, and then ‘access’ … is getting to a park that’s worth going to!

“And you know, what we found is that the distribution of quality assets is inequitable, and it expresses itself in the usage of the parks. To give you a specific statistic. Blacks form 57 percent of the population, but only 26 percent of park usage is by Blacks, whereas with whites it’s the opposite, representing 31 percent of the population but 59 percent of park usage. And I don’t think it’s going out on much of a limb to guess that the reason for that is not because ‘Blacks don’t like parks,’ but rather because the parks they’re able to access are not as good. And so the park plan thinks deeply about that – and how to address that inequity.”

Some of the answer comes down to money, yet Howard explained that answers exist besides raising taxes.

“We’re not a rich city, and we have to be smart about how we expend our resources. One of the issues that the plan addresses is whether [the park governance system] is organized sufficiently that we…utilize our resources as effectively as we can. The [Big Green Easy] Report states that we’re the most fragmented park and recreation system in the country. There are fully 16 separate entities that control green space in the city; sixteen. So the plan raises the question. It doesn’t try to propose exactly how we go about changing this, but it encourages the administration of the city to undertake a separate analysis of how the Parks and Recreation entities are structured in order to identify perhaps a more streamlined structure, particularly looking at more at [The Department of] Parks and parkways. So that we could derive some economic efficiencies out of that and use our limited dollars more effectively.”

Howard also outlined in the interview how connectivity of the parks needed to be improved, but also how that goal is in reach, noting that New Orleans possesses linear parks like the Lafitte Greenway and extensive green links through the neutral ground system. In total, as he explained, “The Plan actually identifies seven big moves,” but it mostly deals in its details of “improving specific parks.”

“The major feedback from the citizens was ‘we love our neighborhood parks. We just want them to be improved, to be better.’ In this we recommend more community programming, particularly due to how NORD functions, making more programs available, and so forth.”

Yet of the seven, he noted the three most important elements of the Big Green Easy Plan:

“First, a one-year plan to … get started with accountabilities assigned to the appropriate parties in the [Cantrell] Administration and City Hall. It recommends, for example, the nomination of a Parks and Recreation ‘Planning Chief’, with the thought being that no current player really has the bandwidth to do all the things that the plan calls for and to focus on them.

“Secondly, again that focus on neighborhoods, improving nearby green spaces. I think this would go a long way to establishing the credibility of the plan (and this again to get back to that point about cynicism) a lot of getting the plan going is to create credibility in the population. That this is something that we can do. And the plan identifies the parks throughout the city that are in greatest need of repair. So we have a very specific targets that are affordable and achievable . So let’s create some meaningful impetus around the plan by going to those parks and fixing them up.

“And then thirdly,…examine the structure of the system you know, bearing in mind that we are so fragmented, what can we do to make the system more efficient? Because that’s going to create the opportunity for more capital dollars, more operating dollars to do more with less. …And this is something that I’ve brought up to the parks and parkways directors. You know NORD-C came about. It’s our latest Commission joining the piles of commissions. We have more commissions and boards for a city of 350,000 people for Orleans Parish than any place I’ve ever seen.”

The plan is available to read by searching “Big Green Easy” online at nola.gov.

This article originally published in the April 22, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.