As the African proverb goes, “When the elephants fight, it
is the grass that suffers.”
The assignment, as I have mentioned, was to prepare a
stand-alone park plan for the city. The city council had previously adopted, as
part of its planning, a so-called “Greenbelt Ordinance” designed to perpetuate
a band of natural area between the existing urban area and any expansion of the
city in coming years.
This concept fell in line with the so-called “garden city
movement” a method initiated in 1898 by Sir Ebenezer Howard in the United
Kingdom. Garden cities were intended to
be planned, self-contained
communities surrounded by "greenbelts", containing proportionate
areas of residences, industry and agriculture.
It was a sound theory, and the undevelopable nature of the
Bayou Bartholomew floodplain lent itself well to the idea. The ordinance that
the city council had passed was well-intentioned and supported by precedent.
There was one major flaw in its design, one that would cause
me many sleepless nights, and a lifetime of resentment. The limits of the greenbelt
weren’t based on elevations, distances from the bayou, or floodplain contours.
This would have reserved basically undevelopable land for the greenbelt, placing
only minimal restrictions on the use of private property.
That wasn’t the way the ordinance was drawn, though. Instead
of reserving land below a certain elevation, the ordinance drew up the greenbelt
boundary according to property lines. If a person’s property touched the bayou,
the entire property fell within the greenbelt and its use restrictions.
Why was this a problem? Two reasons bear pointing out.
First, the use restrictions on land within the greenbelt were severe. The land
could only be used for … a greenbelt. That is to say the land couldn’t be used
at all, only maintained in its natural state, to be enjoyed by the general
public at no expense to themselves.
The second problem created more contention. Why would anyone
want to develop a densely vegetated, snake and varmint invested, floodway in
the first place? As it turned out, some of the property that bordered the bayou
continued past the floodway, then beyond the floodplain boundary, rose up a
hill created by eons of erosion, crossed an area of flat, developable land, and
terminated at the boundary of the Pine Bluff Country Club golf course.
What might have been the choicest property in the city,
property that was in some places far beyond any reasonable outline of a
greenbelt, could now only be left in a natural state.
Needless so say, some property owners were pissed. It is
needless also to add that some of those property owners were people of means.
After some deliberation, we expressed the opinion that the
ordinance intended a sound planning principle, was flawed in design, and would present
few problems in a redesign that would maintain the integrity of the greenbelt
concept and provide relief to the property owner.
Mayor Lites agreed that the repair job was in order and nodded
for us to proceed as we worked on the park plan. The parks director agreed as
well.
Paul Greenberg decided that this presented an opportunity to
create a crisis from nothing in order to harass the mayor, and perhaps to
irritate those associated with the Pine Bluff Country Club, an institution historically
closed to members of his faith. He therefore re-invented the Pine Bluff Greenbelt
Ordinance, in its original form, as the greatest example of urban planning
since Pierre Charles L'Enfant had presented the layout for Washington,
D.C.
He immediately
established it as a document only slightly less sacred than the nation’s
Declaration of Independence.
That set the stage for a confrontation, a confrontation that
would, on occasion, make me long for the relative peace of a war zone.
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| Greenbelts: Nice if you have the money to pay for them. |
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