- Target:
- Gainesville Florida City Commission
- Region:
- United States of America
Recently the City of Gainesville Proposed a zoning change which would threaten our city's most popular community garden with its replacement by 12 story buildings. Interested residents overwhelmingly said NO, and expressed support for the expansion of the gardens and the freeing of the adjacent creek INSTEAD!
Addition of a community orchard/garden and a small recreational space with benches, water fountains and a public composting bathroom were also mentioned.
In short this space could provide the area with much more than revenue, it could provide the whole town with increased health, nutrition and quality of life. The existing community garden also serves as a classroom for the large secular homeschooling community in our area and it's expansion could serve even more of our youth, who would benefit from participating in their own food production and adjacent recreational space.
Please read and sign our petition!
We, the undersigned citizens of Gainesville/Alachua County LOVE the McRorie Memorial Garden (MMG) at the intersection of SE 4th Avenue and SE 6th Terrace, located centrally on the space formed by parcels 12020-17-17, 12020-17-18, and 12020-17-19.
Moreover, we endorse the concept espoused by the city at the time this garden was founded, i.e. that McRorie should be the flagship of a city-wide network of Community Organic Gardens identically established by the City of Gainesville.
Over the years that other entities (N'hood Nutrition Network, FL Organic Growers, etc.) have stepped in to create some of the city's abandoned plan, many local residents have experienced the healing, the valuable family calorie support and neighborhood cohesion that has resulted from our urban gardening.
(1) These food-insecure times show a clear and desperate need for the revival of that concept.
Long-time residents remember (and have shared with newer arrivals) the multiple rounds of struggle with GRU to resist the ugly insertion of a heavy equipment yard on this site during and after the lifetime and leadership of Mr. McRorie. We remember when an outreach team composed of City Planners along with Brad Guy, Pegeen Hanrahan and others out of the UF Rinker School and funded by preliminary planning dollars going into the initiation of the Depot Park Project, brought about 85 of us together in GRU's Multi-Purpose Room, had us work in small groups to draw our vision of the neighborhood on aerial photos, and PROMISED us that our most important desires would be met. (That was when we called our own neighborhood, which some now call 'Power District', the SouthEast Historic Residential District.)
100% of those drawings showed full restoration of the GreenSpace which existed before GRU fenced in parking areas south of the MMG. This GreenSpace existed as an unplanted park area for some 60+ years, stretching from SE 4th Avenue to SE 5th Avenue, on the north and south, and from SE 6th Terrace to SE 6th Street (pavement now removed), on the east and west.
(2) This was a promise made AND WE EXPECT IT TO BE DELIVERED UPON.
The next most favored feature was a reopened creek bed extending south from SE 4th Avenue down to Depot Park with accompanying strip park and pedestrian path as it exists from East University Avenue south to SE 4th Avenue today.
(3) This was also a promise made AND WE EXPECT IT TO BE DELIVERED UPON.
The area being vacated by GRU in the area near its HQ provide ample other space and opportunities for the City and its favored developers to bristle with offices, row houses, or whatever intense uses they may imagine WITHOUT breaking these promises. In fact, we want a second similarly established garden/orchard patch near the SE 5th Avenue edge as there is a persistent waiting list for plots in MMG. And we will realize endless enjoyment upon the intervening open space between the two garden areas.
We have waited over a decade for the fulfillment of PROMISES MADE and these three must be honored by any honorable public officials.
The Expand McRorie Community Gardens petition to Gainesville Florida City Commission was written by maureen and is in the category City & Town Planning at GoPetition.