Louisville's mayor announces a new initiative to make the city's parks safer and cleaner.

Mayor Craig Greenburg says Louisville was one of ten cities selected for the Bloomberg Harvard Cross-boundary collaboration program.

The national program provides resources to help mayors and city officials tackle complex challenges in their cities and improve the quality of life for residents.

Greenberg says his administration wanted to focus on improving the city's parks, which he calls an important resource.

In a survey that was taken as part of the Parks for all plan that the Parks Alliance initiated, we saw that the two top reasons that people said they hesitated to go to parks were concerns about safety and security.

That's not right.

That is unacceptable.

And we know that these areas of concern are bigger issue in some areas of our city than in other areas of our city.

That, too, is not acceptable.

Every person in every neighborhood deserves access to a clean, safe, well-maintained public park.

And they deserve to know that they have access to feel confident when the people of our city share their concerns.

That Louisville Metro government will respond and so over the last seven months, we've assembled a team of leaders that you'll hear from some of them today to strategize on how we can address these important and valid concerns and take other steps to improve our parks, to improve our park experience, to make sure everyone in every neighborhood feels safe in their park and is comfortable when they are using our wonderful parks.

Greenberg says the team is currently working on two parks Iroquois Park and Shepherd Park at Iroquois.

The team is focusing on enforcing hours of operation at Shepherd, cleaning up litter and graffiti.

Greenberg says the team will expand its efforts to all 128 public parks in the city.