City Park Conservancy, the nonprofit that runs the day-to-day operations of New Orleans’ largest park, is resuming its public engagement meetings after months of delay following community outrage over a plan that would have forced Grow Dat Youth Farm to relocate. The conservancy will gather public feedback next Wednesday (Dec. 11) at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral.
The meetings are an opportunity for residents to collaborate and offer feedback on the park’s master plan, a blueprint for a massive redevelopment of the park.
Next week’s meeting will be a revival in community engagement efforts. The Conservancy had scheduled six meetings, the last of which was slated for December, to discuss the master plan. But it paused them after supporters of Grow Dat Youth Farm, which is located in the park, showed out in large numbers at a public meeting in March to advocate against the farm’s relocation.
Justin Kray, president of City Park for Everyone Coalition, a group dedicated to preserving the park’s natural spaces and public access, said the March meeting was “disastrous.” Kray said he is hopeful and wants to see how park leadership has shifted course.
Rebecca Dietz, the president and CEO of City Park Conservancy, said she feels good about continuing the process after their intentional pause.
“I think we recognized that we needed to go deeper into the community,” Dietz said. “We recognized that this plan needs to serve everyone for a long period of time, and we would rather get it right than go fast. City Park is a gathering place for the entire region. It’s a collection of shared public spaces and the planning process [is] to be collaborative and balanced and provide everyone who wants to participate an opportunity to do so.”
Dietz said the park is trying to deepen its outreach with park users and reach out to disengaged community members. She said their surveys showed a lack of engagement with young people and certain neighborhoods — including the 7th Ward and Lakeview — are more responsive than others. City Park Conservancy did not collect data on race or income in its initial survey, but said they reopened it and collected race and gender data in that version.
In order to reach young people and understand their usage of the park, Dietz said the Conservancy created the Ideas Youth Committee. The Committee has met twice, and Dietz said the park has already started to incorporate its suggestions, including requests for more educational and navigational signage throughout the park. Dietz said youth representatives have also asked for areas geared toward older kids, like skate parks.
The Conservancy has also started a Community Fellows program, hiring 11 representatives from across the city who will be facilitators between the park and their respective neighborhoods. Most of the fellows come from neighborhoods close to the park, but others come from Uptown neighborhoods and one is from Westwego.
Dietz said the Conservancy plans to have 4 to 5 pop-up engagement events in every New Orleans City Council district, and fellows will help identify events and festivals in their communities where the park can set up outreach opportunities. She said the park will also offer ways to give feedback on the master plan digitally.
Councilmember Eugene Green, who is also a commissioner at-large for the New Orleans City Park Improvement Association, the governing board for the park, said he welcomes community participation.Â
“This park is sustained by local participation and it was also built for the benefit of local participation,” Green said. “Having citizen input is a must in terms of it being heard and also some implemented and acted upon.”
Kray said he would like to see increased maintenance and protection of the park’s open and natural spaces, including Wisner Tract. He said one way to do this could be by removing poison ivy from the area.
“The challenge is to protect that area and also find a way to develop it with sensitivity, meaning not development like roads and retail, development like, encourage new plant species, look at soil health, look at the lagoon health,” Kray said.
Kray said he would also like to see an acknowledgment of the park’s history as a plantation in the master plan. The land lies on a former plantation where more than 250 people were enslaved over the course of a century. For most of City Park’s long history, Black residents were barred from amenities like playgrounds. The park wasn’t desegregated until 1958.
“I think that if you kind of bypass that history, if you kind of gloss over it, there’s a higher chance that you might stumble into it again,” Kray said. “And we really don’t need that.”
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