Former parks czar turns advocate
Former city parks director Chris Delaporte has lanched a new website devoted to advocating for Baltimore's beautiful but battered park system.
Check it out at: http://www.parkadvocate.org/
One issue Chris raises is the burdensome bureacracy that citizen groups must battle to perform simple volunteer work to enchance the public green spaces near their homes. For example, he says an effort to get $5,000 to maintain the Patterson Park Pagoda was as complex as trying to negotiate Middle Eastern peace.
Have any readers out there had similar frustrations with the city's park system? Or has the system worked well for you?
I report on the environment and Chesapeake Bay. A native of West Virginia, I have focused mainly on Maryland's environment since moving here in 1983. Along the way, I've crewed aboard a skipjack in the bay, canoed under city streets up the Jones Fall from the Inner Harbor, and gone deep underground in a western Maryland coal mine. Recently, I have been covering the growth and development transforming the landscape. I love seafood, rambles in the country and good stories. I hope to share some here.
