TEDxJacksonville Salon on Jacksonville's Environment

Topic: City of Parks Did you know that within Jacksonville's city limits lies the largest municipal preservation park system in the United States? Over 83,000 acres of natural beauty surrounds our community. It connects our waterways, beaches, natural habitat, recreation, and our history-- and we can access any of these parks with just a 30 minute drive. Can these abundant resources define our city's identity? Should Jacksonville be the “City of Parks”?

Led by: Richard Skinner, Architect and President of Timucuan Trail Parks Foundation. Read his op-ed on the matter here.

Cari Holland provided notes from Skinner's Group:

• The top two most attended parks locally are state and federal Parks, not city parks.
• Richard Skinner invited suggestions on how we, as a city, can make city parks more of a priority so that they become a Jacksonville destination.
• We discussed how sustaining funding needs to be a priority and considered programming at these parks. It was noted that students used to take field trips to some of these parks, but that has since stopped-- perhaps due to cost or insurance concerns.
[/li]His group is looking to dub Jacksonville the City of Parks. Some group members felt like there has to be an awareness built up about the asset of our parks (how many, where they are, what you can do there, etc.) before we stake that claim. An alternative was provided as “Discover Jacksonville Parks.” It was discussed that there needs to be an advertising campaign to inform people and raise awareness. [/li]

• Richard’s group is currently adding to their website regularly the location and resource of each of  our local parks.
• We talked about Denver and how they’ve done a great job of incorporating the city’s landscape into parks and it has become a vital asset to the community. (Cherry Creek)
• It was asked of Richard if he thought the city should spend money to purchase more land, and he said not at all, unless it is a piece of property that would begin to link the trail. We discussed that this would allow the Timucuan Trail to link together all around the city through public parks.