Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Lealman: Name for new park a natural

Activists want the Joe's Creek Greenway to bear the name of a woman who listened when no one else would.

By ANNE LINDBERG
Published August 24, 2005

LEALMAN - Ray Neri vividly remembers the night more than five years ago when then-County Commissioner Barbara Sheen Todd came to Lealman.

She stood in front of a room filled with several hundred people and asked them to tell her their problems. As their anger, complaints and blame poured out, Todd made sure their problems were noted.

Soon, county workers came to the unincorporated area to improve things, spurring Lealman's revitalization.

Now that some of their work is coming to fruition, Neri and other members of the Lealman Community Association want to name Joe's Creek Greenway park after Todd, who has since retired.

A ribbon cutting for the new park - tucked away in the middle of east Lealman just off 46th Avenue N between 43rd and 44th streets N - is slated for Sept. 24. Residents want to have the new name in place by then, but plan to continue pressing the county if it is not yet done.

The county will form a committee to listen to suggestions and to make a recommendation to the County Commission, which will make the final decision. The committee has not yet been formed.

The association has lobbied the county for months about the name and even helped head off a county proposal to ban naming things after living people.

Neri said he pointed out that the Pinellas Trail was named after former county administrator Fred Marquis, who is very much alive. Neri called commissioners. This month, they decided not to pass such a ban. Parks can be named after living people.

That successful lobbying effort was not the first for Lealman activists, who had nagged the county to get the park.

That's one reason Neri thinks the residents should determine the name.

"I thought it was appropriate that her name be recognized," Neri said Monday. "We felt like this was a way of saying thank you for stepping in and caring about who we were."

Todd said she was flattered by the gesture. She clearly remembered that visit to Lealman.

"For almost two hours those wonderful people, and there were several hundred of them, told me all about their problems," she said. Afterward, she began badgering Marquis to do something.

"I saw some potential there for that community," Todd said. "I could see the future. . . . Frankly, I'm flattered that they remembered."

When community activists first spotted the property, it was an unknown bit of Eden - an overgrown county-owned patch of ground with a pond in the middle and birds of all descriptions.

Activists, who fell in love with the last bit of green space in the area, started lobbying the county to turn it into a park.

The ultimate goal for them was to have the property as part of a longitudinal park that would stretch on both sides of Joe's Creek from its beginnings just east of the Joe's Creek Industrial Park through Kenneth City to where the creek and the Cross Bayou Canal meet, almost at the Seminole city limits.

They proposed a path for walking, jogging, biking and dog walking on one side of the creek and a horse trail on the other.

County officials at first tried to brush off the proposal, but persistence paid off. This year, the county began a walking path around the land. A walking bridge spans the creek, and a parking area has been installed.

The park inspired a new logo for the community association that features a shady oak next to a bridge over a creek.

[Last modified August 24, 2005, 01:16:13]