Members of the Zephyrhills City Council shared thoughts on how to enhance enjoyment of parks toward the end of their Aug. 26 meeting.
Below are excerpts of remarks they made that have been edited for space or clarity.
Jodi Wilkeson: Connecting parks to people
I was fortunate enough to attend the Florida League of Cities conference recently and they talked a little bit about the creative class.
They made some analogies between what has happened – that 80% of the people in the U.S. were farmers just 100 years ago. Then there’s changes with the Industrial Age, where most people worked in factories for a period of time. Now, much of our community makeup is based on the creative class and those are people who work from home.
Some of these people who work from home, they actually work in libraries, restaurants, etc.
It’s a way to save our Main Street from the trend of dying retail centers.
They talk about the development of parks. One idea I had was that as we get all these parks developed that we have free internet service at those locations, so that they become sharable, Instagrammable locations and we’re connecting with the next generation of young people in our community.
Lance Smith: Making parks safer
My wife and I have been using the tennis courts at Zephyr Park for about two months now. We’ve been going down there in the evenings and it’s great.
There’s a lot of people there; however, there are some people that come by there that are either homeless or have mental illness.
I have asked staff to look at ways that we can help make the park a little bit safer.
There’s a lot of things that we can do with lighting, possibly with some panic call stations that are on the college campuses, but we’ve got to get a handle on this and make it a safe environment for everybody.
I know the staff’s working towards it. Matter of fact, [Chief Derek Brewer] said he’s going to have more patrols down there.
It’s something that as our city grows, it’s part of the growing pains. So we’ve got to just combat it and try and make sure that the people feel safe in these parks.
Councilwoman Wilkeson said something about a coffee shop or something like that. We need to look at opportunities around our park to have these coffee shops, sandwich shops. The commercial element is really nice around these parks. We need to be open and
looking for those opportunities.
