Sunday, June 17, 2018

Redacted Life: Chapter Eight (Cont._2)

Here I was, a young planner in 1971, on my first solo assignment and about to incur the wrath of a Pulitzer Prize winning editorial writer. Further, it was an assignment in my own hometown. I think the conflict to come drew its strength from enmity between Paul Greenberg, the journalist, and the Mayor, a man named Offie Lites.

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.


Greenbelts: Nice if you have
the money to pay for them.

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