New Park: The agreement between U.S. Steel and the Black Warrior – Cahaba Rivers Land Trust to create 1,100-acre Red Mountain Park is a magnificent gift to this community
This community has some good parks and some areas are especially blessed with these open recreational spaces.
However, the Birmingham metropolitan area as a whole has only begun to catch up to widely accepted ratios of park to land to population.
For much of our history, we were too busy with economic activities that depended on exploiting the land and what lay beneath it to bother with setting aside large areas for recreational uses. By the time we recognized the need for more parks, much of the land had already passed into private hands and development. Recovering some of that land for public use is time-consuming and expensive.
That shortage makes an agreement to create an 1,100-acre Red Mountain Park bordering the Oxmoor Valley corridor a truly magnificent gift to the people of this area. When the park is completed, Birmingham will leap to near the top in park land per 1,000 residents.
United States Steel Corp. has given the Black Warrior – Cahaba Rivers Land Trust a two-year option at nominal cost to purchase a stretch of the company’s mineral land holdings along Ishkoda-Wenonah Road for less than 45 percent of its $16.462 million appraised value.
In addition to giving the trust two years to raise the purchase price, U.S. Steel has pledged $1 million as a challenge grant toward development of the park. All told, the value of the U.S. Steel gift exceeds $10 million.
Exact plans have not been developed for Red Mountain Park. Those await public involvement and what we expect to be a successful fund-raising effort by the Land Trust.
But walking and biking trails are certain to occupy some of the higher terrain and athletic fields seeem likely in the lower, more level portions of the property. Wendy Jackson, executive director of the Land Trust envisions 18 miles of trails within the park linking to trails outside the park to form a 64-mile network.
But whatever the final form recreational choices take in Red Mountain Park, the park is bound to make this an even more pleasant place to live.
© 2005 The Birmingham Post-Herald (AL) and may not be republished without permission.
