In This Issue

Next RMP Public Meeting Set for Tuesday, Oct. 24

Design Firm Wallace, Roberts & Todd returns the week of October 23 to present a preliminary draft of the Red Mountain Park Master Plan. The public meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, Oct. 24 from 5:30 p.m. until 7:00 p.m. at the Arrington Auditorium of the Birmingham Public Library downtown branch. The planners will be looking for community response to the ideas they present and gathering a final round of input before completing the park's master plan by this December. If you've been to previous meetings, come see how your ideas are taking shape. If you haven't come out yet, come out, show your support and add your voice.

What can you do?

  1. You can attend public meetings. Aside from getting first hand information about the park, your presence is noted by public officials and community leaders who we'll need to get the park going.
  2. You can pass this newsletter on to anyone you think might be interested in this project. Everyone who visits the website and signs up for the newsletter is added to the Friends of Red Mountain list. We've also added a page on My Space (www.myspace.com/redmountainpark) and you can sign up there if you choose. The more friends we have the better case we can make that the community supports the development of Red Mountain Park.
  3. Talk it up. Talk to friends. Write to official and express your appreciation to those who've supported Red Mountain park.
  4. Give money. Jefferson County has pledged a $7 million over five years, with $2 million up front to help secure the land. The state's Congressional delegation has steered more than $1 million federal money toward the park. The Hugh Kaul Foundation and Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham have offered significant support. We need your support to finalize the land acquisition and to complete the master planning process. Giving is simple. Go to the Community Foundation's webpage (www.foundationbirmingham.org). Scroll to the bottom and click on the "Donate Now" button. You're donation is tax-deductible. You can even pay by credit card.
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Where we've come from; Why we're here, where we're going

As we enter the fall of 2006, the Red Mountain Park is on the verge of becoming a reality. The proposal for Red Mountain Park came at the same time as Birmingham was pushing ahead for a downtown Railroad Reservation Park and at the same time as Ruffner Mountain was pushing for an expansion and a revamped entrance. The three together have produced a generational opportunity: to transform Birmingham from a smokestack town to one of the greenest cities in America, with more park space per capita that virtually any other city. You have played a key part in getting us this far. In the coming year, you will be needed more than ever to bring the park into reality.

First steps
In June, Wallace, Roberts &Todd—the landscape design firm tasked with creating the park's master plan—first visited Birmingham to get acquainted with the land and with the community. The volunteer steering committee assembled by the Freshwater Land Trust to help develop the park hosted a public meeting at Vulcan and a series of meetings with interested partners.

In August, Wallace, Roberts &Todd returned to gather more input from the community and to begin defining what the park might be and what might be in it. The August meetings were particularly productive. Representatives of the West Birmingham neighborhoods turned out in force with positive encouragement, useful suggestions, and constructive criticism. User groups—particularly the runners, bikers, walkers—came together in a cooperative way to begin making solid decisions on a trail system through the park.

Red Mountain Park is the natural conjunction of a regionwide system of greenway trails and the park itself offers incredible opportunities for a looping system of trails, some paved and accessible, some single track and challenging for the best mountain bikers. The outermost trail, paved and accessible, might be a 9 mile loop. A trail along the ridgeline might stretch 4 miles and offer mountaintop vistas. In between on the slopes of the mountain, there are opportunities for additional rings of trail. All of them will offer great ridge views and woodland solitude, minutes from downtown: ridges of hydrangeas under a hardwood canopy. Stands of longleaf pine. Wildflowers along trailsides.

Scattered across the ridge are ruins or the ore mines on which Birmingham was built. Those sites will be preserved and explained along the miles of abandoned rail corridors that will soon be traversed by bikers and hikers. In addition to developing trails within the park, the steering committee and planners are looking at creative routes to link Red Mountain Park with downtown and UAB.

There is singular consensus that this space will be an active and athletic park. The land that comprises Red Mountain Park was completely cut over, mined, mashed and mushed and rearranged. In the places, a native forest has grown back and we will preserve and enhance it. But much of the park is fundamentally altered and supplanted with kudzu and privet. These are areas we can really roll up our sleeves a and develop fields or athletic facilities or restore native vegetation. At the same time quiet space will be guarded and some of the most scenic spots in the county will be opened to the public and preserved for the generations.

Next Step
Wallace, Roberts & Todd are now hard at work assimilating the additional information they gleaned and will come back in October with the first real proposals of what the park might look like. If you haven't engaged in the process yet, do it in October. Those of us involved share an excitement about this project. We believe we have a once in a generation chance to think big and in the process join together a region that is often divided along municipal, cultural and racial lines. At the same time though, this project faces special challenges, challenges that make all of you who are involved and interested, all the more important.

Nothing will be built at Red Mountain park without your willingness to roll up your sleeves: to participate and to come to the table with ideas and with contributions. There is no single governmental body that will bring this park into existence. There is no government that will single-handedly fund its operation. We are going to need all of you, as citizens, as donors, as laborers, to make this thing go.

Later this year, the responsibility for developing the park will pass to the 15-member Red Mountain Greenway and Recreational Area Commission. On the last day of the legislative session, Representatives Paul DeMarco and Merika Coleman and Senators Rodger Smitherman and Jabo Waggoner helped us pass a state bill that created the Commission. This Commission will manage, and operate the Park. Although we have not asked the State to fund the Park's operations, state ownership will give the park sovereign immunity. Governor Bob Riley signed the bill into law on April 21, 2006.

But you will continue to be the most important force driving the development of this park. Without support from the public, it won't get done.

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Thanks for your support,

Tom Spencer
Friends of Red Mountain Park