All right. Just for perspective. Thank you. Good afternoon.
Good afternoon. My name is Hector Baez. I am a civil engineer who specializes in storm water management, site design and planning. 155 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 I've prepared a short statement for this hearing. The Fairmount Park system is a great example of the effect that good planning and good strategic management can do. The Fairmount Park system benefits thousands of citizens on a daily basis and really adds to the character of the City. This large Park sustains many businesses within the area and provides Philadelphians with a unique outdoor retreat full of history, nature and wellness. Fairmount Park is also a great location for a plethora of venues ranging from weddings to the famous crew races along historical Boathouse Row. If chosen, I would appreciate assisting in the direction and implementation of the Park's resources. I think my background in design and construction of infrastructure would serve the Commission well and my knowledge of wetlands, coupled with thoughtful planning to conserve the 156 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 natural resources of the Park while simultaneously providing access to the all the Park's rich amenities. As a resident and homeowner in Philadelphia, I would also like to join the Parks and Recreation Commission to better serve Philadelphians near their homes. I've always wanted a more active role and direction in Philadelphia, and I feel this Commission would be an excellent opportunity to have real impact on developing some of the neglected areas. It is my opinion that the City's Park system has a direct correlation to the quality of life of its residents. Many parks throughout the City have grown to be an integral part of its neighborhood, and with the success of each park comes a stable, safer, more aesthetically pleasing surrounding area. This all translates into higher property values and intangible benefits like quality of life. Once these parks and 157 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 neighborhoods become stabilized, they will provide a better context to introduce recreation activities that can further serve the residents of the City. The unique neighborhood system, with block captains and community organizations, can provide an essential partnership with the Commission to assist in providing successful, well-targeted strategies that will help the City grow. Stimulating neighborhoods can come from the rehabilitation of existing parks or by expanding the City's Park system by utilizing the vast inventory of vacant lots owned by the City. Those selected vacant lots can be improved and maintained by City and community organization partnership. These are some examples of the impact I hope you achieve if chosen by this panel. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Thank you 158 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 for your testimony.
My name is Johannah Fine. I live in West Philadelphia, and I'm surprised to say I'm relieved to be here, and the surprise at my own feelings is, I was so worried about the initial publicity about how few people had shown interest in the Commission, and I will go home and sleep well tonight, because I have heard a group that I would like to hang around with.
I wanted to say to everybody, Hey, gang, my people. Thank you for making us aware of each other more through this kind of forum. So aside from being enthusiastic and discovering, wow, lots of folks are willing to step up, I'm an instructor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Horticulture at Temple. I'm very stiff today from teaching students how to yank out invasive plants yesterday. Ouch. Noble work. 159 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 I am a certified arborist, have been a volunteer with Philadelphia Green, University City Green and many West Philadelphia groups for almost years 6 in greening and community development. 7 My daughter went to -- who is 8 now 19 and in college -- went to 9 pre-school at 51st and Spruce, and one of 10 the reasons I chose the particular 11 pre-school was that it was right near 12 Malcolm X Park, and I had this idea that 13 wouldn't it be wonderful because when we 14 walked home, we could walk home through 15 the park. But I didn't know the park 16 well, and this is 16 years ago. And so 17 on nice days, I would drag her home 18 through the park, and she finally said to 19 me, Mommy, I don't like to go this way. 20 And I hated saying why, and she'd say, Mom, we can't walk on the grass, there's glass everywhere. Mommy, it's ugly here. And I had to admit to myself that a lot of the trees were dead, and as a biologist, I had been fighting noticing 160 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 that all the trees were the same age and that they had been planted -- actually, there were two age groups. Most of them were planted in the 1920's or '30s and a very few in the 1950's. And so we stopped walking through the park, because it was so sad. But this is the same time when the same kid was our official tamper when we were out planting street trees with Tree Tenders and learning to work with Fairmount Park. A couple of years later I went to work as the head gardener in Bartram's Garden and got to know Fairmount Park and its wonderful crew, who I love deeply, because we all learned to work together, by golly, because Bartram's Garden is part of Fairmount Park, but is duly administered by a non-profit along with Fairmount Park. So I pick up a lot of skills in how to bridge that, putting the non-profit and the government work 161 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 together as the gardener, but I kept coming back to Malcolm X and thinking, how do we get so stuck like this. And an amazing thing happened, because it turned out all around the City there were other people like us, whether they were Tree Tenders, you heard from Carla Puppin today. She's another one of -- our numbers multitude, and we're in every neighborhood, who we're saying, You know what, I think we can do better than this and we can work "with" as against working against the Rec Department, Fairmount Park. We learned to partner. We learned to buddy. And if you go over to Malcolm X Park today, you will see what Gregorio Cojulun and friends have achieved. You can have church picnics out there. You can have revival meetings, family picnics, and last fall Malcolm X --
-- Malcolm X Park was the staging area for the planting of 162 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 168 trees, all across West Philadelphia, so that this once dismal place was the center of hundreds of people going out, pulling the beauty and strength of the park and the community into its streets from what had once been bleakness. I want to bring that capacity to the Commission. There's many of us who can bring that capacity, and I'll tell you the truth, I don't mind who brings it, but I want it brought. We can squeeze a quarter out of a nickel. We can work together with government agencies, non-profits and communities, and we make things happen for everybody. Let's do more of it.
Good afternoon, and thank you very much for holding this. It's been -- I think the passion that we have heard has been what's most exciting to me. 163 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057
My name is Kay Sykora and I currently manage the Schuylkill Project, which is a waterfront project that is between East Falls and Manayunk. It's two CDCs. We're funded by William Penn, and we're looking at the trails and the green space and the connections into the neighborhood.
Kay Sykora, S-Y-K-O-R-A. I'm sorry. I'm out of order because --
No. It's not a problem. I just want my records to be accurate.
Okay. Thank you. Testimony about picking up trash and being frustrated, it's interesting because somehow from that I moved into partnerships with Fairmount Park, past President of the Schuylkill River Heritage Area, which is a regional 164 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 planning and implementation group that's funded through DCNR. I've sat on committees of DCNR and worked with many City agencies through the Schuylkill Project, and for years I headed up the 7 Manayunk Development Corporation. So in 8 that role, I started a lot of the 9 planning that resulted in improvements to 10 the Fairmount Park. So for over 30 11 years, I've worked to support and advance 12 Parks and Recreation, the communities of 13 Manayunk, Roxborough and East Falls. 14 I've always believed that they were our 15 biggest asset. And I'm really ecstatic, 16 as I said earlier, over the public 17 interest and commitment that we see now. 18 In the early years, you didn't see so much of that. But it's grown, and that's very exciting. And it was validated recently in a report done by Peter Harnik that was released through, I believe, the advisory group to Fairmount Park, which talks about the dollar value. But this is just the beginning. 165 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 I mean, we're talking about green parks, connecting them with trails. We're working on connections not just to other parks, but to Lower Merion, across our bridges, where we are trying to secure funding for that into Montgomery County through the Valley Forge Trail. Our waterfronts, accessibility to all these amenities for all neighborhoods, because not all neighborhoods have access to this stuff, the programming that makes it alive, and most of all what people keep forgetting to talk about is the sustainability for the long term. I mean, all this is really exciting and it's exciting that people are interested, but how are we going to take care of it for the long term. I've been actively engaged in many kinds of planning. We've secured grants for public funding for planning, for projects, for operations. We've partnered with many groups, a wide range 166 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 of environmental and groups doing the same kind of work. We've created programming for our park area for education for our schools. We bring the schools down. We have boating activities. We have educational. We're working with the Water Department now on some storm water mitigation projects. We also have created volunteer groups. We have four or five, who each have different kind of special interests. And they are not just volunteers. I mean, that's part of it, but they also bring their passion around wanting to help expand the effort. You can see the physical results of these efforts when you see the Schuylkill Trail in Manayunk, when you see the Manayunk Canal improvements, which are halfway done and still have a ways to go. We're due to have a major park constructed on lower Venice Island, which will begin construction in July of '09, and that will include both park 167 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 space and a performance center, which will service the entire city. We're going to be working with non-profits that are involved with that. Capital dollars are not easy. I mean, that's obvious, but it's in part because it's been a small pool of money and there hasn't been a lot of competition, and now there's a lot of people that want those dollars. But I believe that people's passion will bring this forward and we'll begin to see, after the economy begins to straighten out, more dollars. But the biggest challenge for the future, particularly in the smaller neighborhoods, will be around sustainability, because with volunteers you can do a lot, but one of the things we did because we have volunteers and we kind of fell short is, we did a whole study over the last two years of operations and management, of how we can support the Parks and Rec, and what we 168 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES.
090057 found is, it's a very complicated bag of solutions. It's one that we want to take and sort of have more of a citywide dialogue, because some of them do involve citywide thinking in terms of TIFs or bids or that kind of thing. So the answer is complicated. It's not easy. But it requires us as the public to continue to raise the bar of expectation, and I firmly believe that will raise the bar what will happen with our parks.
So sustainability will be a difficult conversation for the future, but -- and all this is competing with very real other infrastructure needs with the City, we recognize that, but our parks are absolutely critical for the future of the City of Philadelphia, and I would like very much to be a part of the Commission to help see that move forward. Thank you. 169 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057
Good afternoon. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. I am David Dannenberg. I was scheduled Tuesday. I was away at a conference.
I have a prepared statement. I think I've got it down to three minutes.
There is currently growing recognition of the importance of natural open space and of regular physical activity to both the health of the planet and physical and mental health of the nation's citizenry. Over a hundred year ago, long before the first national park was created, the leaders of the City of Philadelphia had the foresight to commit large swaths of land to naturalized open space. They did 170 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 this, first of all, to protect the sources of the City's drinking water and, second of all, to provide places of refuge from the daily grind of city life. Today our parklands remain Philadelphia's most valuable asset, an asset that cannot be replaced. This physical legacy makes Philadelphia unique among cities in the northeast. As the surrounding regions have succumbed to rapacious development while largely neglecting open space, Philadelphia stands uniquely poised to create the model 21st century green city. Two things have been a constant in my adult life. The first is that I work with young people. My wife likes to say I've been mentoring adolescents since I was one. The second is an abiding interest in conservation, of the interface between people and the natural world that sustains us. In my professional life I'm a teacher, and in that capacity, I have the privilege to bring students with me weekly to 171 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 Fairmount Park, each week renewing my conviction that there exists essential connections among physical activity, outdoor experience, public service, individual responsibility and the process of maturation. In a related way, I was instrumental to enhancing the volunteer conservation work of the Friends of the Wissahickon, a role that has allowed me to connect education and conservation with a variety of recreation park users that constitute a broad cross section of fellow Philadelphians. Most importantly for our purposes here, for the past ten years I've been active on the Board and on committees of Friends of the Wissahickon. Most of my efforts have been focused on the conceptualization and steering of the Sustainable Trails Initiative. This multi-million-dollar project stands among the one or two largest private projects ever undertaken on behalf of the Philadelphia citizens and visitors who 172 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 use Fairmount Park. My leadership and participation in this product has ranged from physical labor to the intellectual challenges of conceiving and effectively communicating the intricacies of the project to public agencies, private institutions and various stakeholders. I have the pleasure of working with City agency personnel at the district level in the field and at various administrative levels, as well as with volunteers of diverse ages and backgrounds. I have experienced firsthand the satisfaction of bringing together sometimes vehemently opposed user groups to work in harmony toward common goals.
Through this work, I've honed my ability to appreciate differing perspectives and to speak sympathetically to others' concerns, without compromising essential principles. 173 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 I'll skip ahead here. Communities all over the country are scrambling to create and improve public parks and recreational facilities, while Philadelphia boasts one of the best and most extensive networks of park and recreation infrastructure in the country. We can capitalize on this asset for the long-term benefit of our city's social and economic health or we can let it further deteriorate or succumb to piecemeal dismemberment in pursuit of short-term gain. As a Commissioner, I'd remain focused on the long-term integrity of our Parks and Recreation system, along with short and mid-term enhancements. To accomplish this, I'd encourage public-private partnerships, along with the pursuit of dedicated long-term city, state and federal funding. My range of experience will provide perspective. My principles will provide integrity. Thank you for your 174 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 consideration.
Thank you for your testimony. Thank you very much. Good afternoon.
My name is Janice Ries Stern and I'm not sure whether I'm on the list today.
Do you have -- I see it. Okay. I just want to be sure.
Yes. And I handed my testimony and letters of recommendation to someone here. Thank you very much for convening this hearing and for taking a leadership role in really rationalizing the resources in the City Parks and Recreation and Fairmount Park Commission.
Thank you. It only took nine years. You must persist and remain a possibility thinker and bring others along the way down the road.
Yes. I can 175 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 completely relate. I have been a Philadelphian for 30 years, and I believe there is a powerful connection between health, well-being and recreation. I regularly kayak, walk, hike, cross country ski and plant trees in the City. My credentials, which are adequately documented in the application -- and I don't want to spend a lot of time on that right here, but they include that I'm a lawyer, I have a degree in urban studies and I've recently worked with a non-profit organization concerned with natural land preservation. I'm also an educator and I worked as a teacher and administrator in Philadelphia and in the suburbs for eight years. My work experience includes 20 years of board and leadership positions at Inglis Foundation, which is the operating foundation here in Philadelphia dedicated to improving the lives of people with physical disabilities. As 176 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 the Chair of Inglis Housing Corporation, I oversaw staff in the financing, design, building of approximately 150 units for people with physical disabilities. Most of those units are in Philadelphia. As an Inglis officer, I also oversaw investment of its multi-million-dollar endowment. I was the creator of the Inglis Ace Award Program. It took me ten years to convince my colleagues that it made sense for us to give some money away in order to know more about what other people were doing in the community, and so I identify with your nine-year effort. The Parks and Recreation Commission enabling language calls for the new Commission to represent many diverse constituency. It doesn't specifically call for representation of people with physical disabilities, and I am not a person with a physical disability, but if appointed, my connection to the disability community 177 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 will allow me to add a perspective that could be valuable to the Commission and the people it serves. In anticipation of the creation of the new Commission, I have been studying the guidelines of other cities with respect to sale, purchase, trade and lease of parkland. Sound public policy about parkland and recreation facility management requires clear guidelines about how they are to be used. Clear guidelines will create a fair and efficient process for evaluation of economic development opportunities within public lands and recreation facilities. And I believe that Councilman DiCicco referred to this in a recent article in the Inquirer, and I think that Mr. Randolph and some other folks here have said how important these guidelines are. Without them, we will continue to confront time-consuming and expensive conflicts over competing priorities, such 178 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 as we experienced with the Fox Chase case and Burholme Park.
So basically what I'd like to say, since I have so little time, is that we need to figure out ways to establish collaboration between private industry and public resources. We have an obesity problem in this country. We have an asthma problem. There are ways in which we can share costs, share revenues and share goals with funding streams that are provided to address these issues. So apart from my fierce commitment to recreation --
Did you hear me? I think you've honored the 15 seconds.
Okay. Apart from my fierce commitment to recreation and 179 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 parks, the other reason for my interest is that I am a very creative person. I'm a creativity junkie, if you will, and I look at this as an amazing opportunity to think outside the box, to think strategically, to bring people together and to really avail ourselves of all kinds of opportunities that are out there that don't traditionally align themselves with parks. We will find the connections, and that's how we will support what we need to do here. So thank you so much.
You're very, very welcome. We thank you all for, again, your very, very interesting and passionate testimony. Thank you for your testimony. Alvin Hornstein, Robert Lambert, Rose Gray. And I believe that may wrap us up.
Ray Devlin. Please come forward. (Witnesses approached witness table.)
Good afternoon, gentlemen. Thank you for your indulgence and your patience. Please state your name for the record and then offer your testimony. Please.
Alvin S. Hornstein. I'm going to give you a little testimony that's kind of different. I'm going to tell you what I accomplished for Fairmount Park from the years 1966 to the years 1977.
For five hours 181 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 I've been standing at my old boss staring down at me, Mayor James H.C. Tate. I hope he approves of what I'm going to be telling you. He appointed Abe Rosen as the City Representative in 1966, and Abe immediately called me and asked me to be his Deputy. In 1968, he approved Abe Rosen becoming President of the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau, and Abe asked me to go ahead and join him as Director of Tourism and Public Relations. Here's where I've accomplished for Fairmount Park between 1966 and 1977, and it really was accomplished without any money from the City, which I'm sure you're glad to hear. I have other plans, about a dozen, that I can talk about at the end of the procedure. That may cost some money, but I'm hoping that the stimulus money might help us out. I was Director of Tourism and Public Relations for the Convention and 182 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 Visitors Bureau from 1968 to 1977. From '66 to '68, I was the Deputy to Abe Rosen. We had a group called the Philadelphia Area for Tourism, which I was the Executive Director. We went on from there. We created new brochures, and historians wanted to lynch me, because I took Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell off of the brochures and put the Benjamin Franklin Parkway on the brochures as the front. When the hotel people asked why or the historians asked why, it was very simple. Independence Hall and Liberty Bell is a three-hour toilet stop for most bus trips and we wanted them to stay longer, because the hotel people wanted to put heads on their pillows. So we felt that the Parkway and Fairmount Park was the answer, because if you stayed in one of those institutions for a few hours, the odds are you'd put your head on a pillow that night and stay in one of our hotels. And that was the purpose of the Convention and Visitors 183 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 Bureau, to get tourists. Hotel people did not consider a tourist if you came in by bus, touched the Bell, went to Independence Hall, had lunch, went to the toilet and left for New York or Washington. So we created the Parkway and Fairmount Park as the gem, the undiscovered gem of Philadelphia. My campaign was called Welcome to Surprising Philadelphia. We won a national award from Discover America for that one year for our program. The Tourist Bureau had no money to send me to San Diego, so when I told them to mail me the trophy, they gave in and sent me to, at their expense, to San Diego to accept the trophy. Now, we got a lot of publicity on that. So Surprising Philadelphia was our answer to the fact that nobody really knew Philadelphia. All they knew was Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. Frank Binswanger, Sr. was our Vice-Chairman in those days. He came in 184 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 and chewed me out, because nobody went to see the colonial and historical houses.
That's it? Well, anyway, I created the trolley buses that Mr. Binswanger raised the money in two years. I created the Cultural Loop Bus, which also went to the Fairmount Park, colonial houses, the Zoo and all the Parkway institutions. I also would like to ask you a question, Madam Chairman. How many people here know that there's a Japanese Teahouse in Fairmount Park? They all do. Well, this is a great group, then, because no citizens usually go there to visit. Why? Because we have no activities going on there. So my point, when Elaine Malbin, who was one of Frederick R. Mann's proteges, came to Philadelphia in Madam Butterfly, she had a tea ceremony, which drew a lot of people, and it hasn't been used since, to 185 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 the best of my knowledge. I also --
All right. I started the familiarization tours with the airlines, and they never did it before because they say nobody ever asked them. So in eight years that I was there, we had about 300 or more travel agents, tour operators and travel riders come visit Philadelphia. On Friday night, we went to Franklin Institute for dinner and a Mummers String Band. They had never given money to a tourist legislative committee of our state until they spent that night in the Franklin Institute. The next year -- Joel Bloom just passed away, but Joel Bloom was the Director, and he got a grant from the state for Franklin Institute for the first time in the history of Philadelphia. So that was another accomplishment. 186 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057
All right. I helped develop with the women's groups from the Academy of Natural Science a Super Sunday, where a half a million people in the first week in October went to have a great time in Fairmount Park Parkway. It was destroyed a few years later by the illegal vendors. So the Zoo -- we had a Zoo Year's Eve party on midnight.
Okay, then. Thank you very much for your testimony. Good afternoon, sir.
Hello. My name is Raymond Devlin. I am a longtime resident of Green Hill Farms neighborhood of 187 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 Overbrook in West Philadelphia, and I'm honored to be here before you to discuss my candidacy for the Board membership to the Fairmount Park Commission on Parks and Recreation. To me, this service is a great opportunity to give back to the City that I love in a way for which I have significant knowledge and experience and for a cause for which I have great passion and interest in the Parks and Recreation resources of the City of Philadelphia. Fairmount Park and its facilities is nationally recognized for their excellence. Philadelphia's Park and Recreation facilities and centers are an ever-important resource to the stability and viability of the neighborhoods of the City. I believe that with my professional background of 30 years in land use planning, community and economic development, finance and education, I will be a valuable asset to 188 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 the Board, the City, the Parks and Recreation staff and ultimately to the end users of the Parks and Recreation facilities. I'm proud to say that I was a commuter for ten years in Philadelphia and I greatly appreciate it from my home in Green Hill Farms in West Philadelphia. I commuted months of the year and I 11 was very appreciative of the Parks 12 Department treating it as a commuting route and plowing it during snowing days. It didn't stop me from going to work and it didn't stop them from plowing. And I'm also an avid cyclist and a runner. I have run actively within a number of marathons and half marathons, and I really appreciate the resources that Philadelphia avails to it to the groups that use that as a fundraising mechanism. I have worked as a community development consultant with the Water Works, Lloyd Hall, the Please Touch Museum, and appreciate the redevelopment 189 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 and reinvigoration of active resources, and what I will bring to the Board is a vision and a big picture to help the staff augment its abilities to fulfill its day-to-day responsibilities, and I hope to be a sound and insightful and concerted colleague to my fellow Board members. That's it.
Well, thank you for your testimony. Thank you also. Thank you all for the rich, rich mix and blend of talent that this City indeed represents. This concludes the third of a four-part series of our hearings. The Committee will stand at recess --
Can I say something, Madam Chair? Point of information.
Yes. Let's hear a point of information from my colleague and Vice-Chair, Councilman 190 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 Curtis Jones.
I just want to point out that our Chairperson, Blondell Reynolds Brown, has not only championed this cause, but has proven to me today that she has stamina beyond all stamina to listen to all of these testimonies, and I guarantee you, she listened to them and I guarantee you she made notes about each of them. Whether it's a good idea or a bad idea, she probably made notes, and I just want to on the record say and thank her for being Chair.
Well, thank you very, very much. You can be assured I took good notes -- (Applause.)
Thank you. (Continued) -- that I'll be able to share with all members of this Committee so that we indeed seek to achieve the long-term goal we've been after. So thank you, Councilman. 191 3/24/09 - PARKS - RES. 090057 And know that this Committee stands at recess until March the 26th at 1 o'clock p.m., and we hope to reconvene in City Council Chambers. Thanks again for being here and for your important testimony. (Committee on Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs recessed at 5:20 p.m.) - - - 192 CERTIFICATE I HEREBY CERTIFY that the proceedings, evidence and objections are contained fully and accurately in the stenographic notes taken by me upon the foregoing matter on March 24, 2009, and that this is a true and correct transcript of same. ______________________________ MICHELE L. MURPHY RPR-Notary Public (The foregoing certification of this transcript does not apply to any reproduction of the same by any means, unless under the direct control and/or supervision of the certifying reporter.)