Hanover County Parks and Recreation is preparing to produce a Comprehensive Facilities Master Plan, which will serve as the blueprint for future development of parks and recreational facilities in the County.
Now is the time to envision how Hanover can create a plan that encompasses green and open passive spaces and natural areas as well as sports and active facilities.
Citizens need to make their wishes known now through a community survey. The process will take about 10 minutes to complete.
Link to this survey through the homepage of the Hanover County website and the Parks & Recreation website
Filed under: 2006 Comp Plan |
hanoversfuture.org 
I hope citizens will respond. Has Parks & Rec made this plan and survey generally known? The time to plan is before development snatches up the land!
Spread the word! Forward this website to all your green friends. Don’t just “hope” – act!
I would like Parks and Rec to explicitly include some representation from citizens’ groups (CHF, HN, etc.) in the formal mechanism for updating the Parks and Rec master plan. Formally give them seats at the table, identified as such. Without having done my basic research yet, I would say offhand I would like to see in the revised Parks and Rec Master Plan:
1. More passive open spaces
2. More aggressive landowning by the county for future open space uses
3. A green infrastructure inventory including land in conservation easements
4. A new classification (or actual use of any existing classification) for small county-owned neighborhood and pocket parks
5. Working with neighborhoods to identify and buy private residences that come up on the market and raze them and turn them into passive pocket parks (the “vacant lots” of old) — obviously that would take a lot of coordination with folks in the neigborhoods
6. A workable plan for a biking/walking trail network
7. Tie-in to a PDR plan that covers the whole county, not just outside the SSA.
8. Pushing for the county planning department to look at putting buffers around each new development that are public linear parks with walking/biking trails. These could be pierced by road connections between developments in a way that walking/biking is the more direct route, the road connections are less direct and are located at the least dense areas of the development to hold down shortcut traffic through the existing developments they connect to, existing neighborhoods get some green space and trails in return for being connected (which no one wants when it comes up), and we get the connections we need to fight traffic congestion and promote safer, walkable routes to school, church, community centers, etc.
Just some ideas, maybe workable, maybe not, but worth some serious discussion I think.