Greenway experts emphasize importance of grassroots engagement

Imagine there was a paved trail for walking and biking between downtown Charlottesville and Monticello, or a trail from Crozet to the University of Virginia.

Would people use them? What benefits might they provide? Who would oppose them? Whose property would they be built on?

Local planners and environmental organizations are initiating a conversation to take years of greenway and trail ideas from plans to reality.

“We have done a lot of planning in this community … and none of them are necessarily bad, but they are not all well integrated, and they don’t identify the low-hanging fruit,” said Rex Linville, of the Piedmont Environmental Council. “They are also not plans that are steeped in community support.”

Using a $180,000 grant from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, the PEC and the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission are convening community members in an approach they believe will yield results.

At an event Wednesday at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, attended by about 125 people, the PEC brought two greenway experts to Charlottesville to share some best practices.

Chuck Flink, president of Durham, North Carolina-based Greenways Inc., has authored a book on the subject and is a leading designer of greenway systems, having worked in more than 250 communities around the country.

“Greenways have greatly added life in the economies of many communities across America, and I submit that they really have become America’s new Main Street,” said Flink. “It’s where we go, when we slow down long enough, that we are not in automobiles and we are actually seeing people, greeting each other and exchanging pleasantries.”

Flink made the case that greenways have numerous benefits, including in the environment, education, mobility, social needs and the economy. He said the locations being discussed for greenway connections in Charlottesville, such as downtown to Monticello, cover distances that are very feasible for these projects.

As an example of good public engagement, Flink described in detail the 25-mile urban Wolf River Greenway, a project he is currently working on in Memphis, Tennessee. The $50 million project is a public-private partnership, with half the funding coming from private sources.

“This has been a project that’s been on the books for over 30 years but they couldn’t really move it off dead center,” Flink said.

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When he asked city officials in 2014 about the public engagement process to date, he discovered a major challenge.

“They said, ‘We haven’t done any public engagement. We don’t want to do any public engagement. We don’t want to know what our residents think about this greenway because we think it’s going to be very controversial,’” Flink said. “I said, ‘Well, we are going to do public engagement.’ We spent nine months and spent a lot of money and a lot of time going out doing a whole series of meetings.”

Beyond traditional planning charrettes, Flink specifically sought to engage residents in their neighborhoods and at their community events. In his work around the country, he sees similar challenges.

“You are going to face a lot of opposition,” said Flink. “You are going to face people who don’t understand why you are doing this, why they should be involved, why their land has to be committed to this. But at the end of the day, the experience that we have all across America is that these are very, very positive facilities and resources.”

Linville said he thinks a similar approach to community engagement will be important in Charlottesville, as greenways here would cross diverse neighborh