- (female announcer) Production funding for Behind the Headlines is made possible in part by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

- The past, present, and future of parks in Memphis, tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I'm Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for joining us.

I'm joined tonight by Jen Andrews, CEO of Shelby Farms Parks Conservancy.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thank you for having me.

- Nick Walker is Director of Parks for the City of Memphis.

Thanks for being here.

- I'm glad to be here.

- Carol Colletta, CEO of Memphis River Parks Partnership.

Thanks for being here again.

- Good to see you.

- And I should note, we were hoping to have... We'd scheduled Tina Sullivan from the Overton Park Conservancy to be on.

She couldn't be here today, unfortunately, but we'll talk also about Overton Park.

And part the premise, I think you had never been on the show, but we obviously report a lot of what you do, Nick, and we've done a podcast, I think, in COVID about changes in the parks and investments have been made in the parks.

And you said, "I think it'd be great to come on "with the three people who run "probably the three biggest parks "that are public-private partnerships and talk through all that."

Again, we can't have Tina here.

Full disclosure, I am a former board chair of the Overton Parks Conservancy, and recently met with a bunch of folks from Overton Parks, so I can fill in some blanks on that, and obviously y'all can too.

But for you, for the city, one of the common denominators of these two, plus Overton Park, is they are these public-private partnerships.

Memphis River Parks is a slightly different structure, but for talking purposes, it has its independence.

Is that, and I remember, I used to get this a lot, especially when I was on the Overton Park board, people saying, "Well, we'll just form a conservancy and that's gonna take care of everything."

Is that the future of parks in Memphis?

- I think, if you're just having an honest assessment about this and Jen and Carol and Tina and I have all had this conversation independent of one another, but truthfully, it depends, is a great way to put that.

I think that the time that all of the conservancies that currently exist, and obviously, Shelby Farms is different, because that is on county property inside the city limits.

But the other two, there was a contraction of the city budgetarily.

There was a lot going on.

And so I think in both instances, it was a great opportunity for a group that was really passionate about a space to do that.

At large, no, I think that they would tell you that conservancies are very difficult.

Your experience at Overton Park also, you're aware just how difficult it is to raise the funds without the ability to levy taxes to do those things.

That being said, the right balance of them is a wonderful solution.

It allows city resources to be spent on other parks, and it allows the groups that are really passionate about those spaces to do what they want to do.

- And we will talk about the, what, hundred and sixty-two parks in Memphis and changes there and things that are going on, but let me bring in Jen.

Start with my goofy premise, but is a conservancy the answer?

I mean, Shelby Farms, one thing people forget is that 20-something years ago, it was embroiled in serious controversy.

There were talk of selling parts or all of it off.

There was talk of developing.

There was talk of putting a highway through it.

There was certainly not talk of making it the park it is today.

Is it that it was turned into a conservancy, is that what made it possible, or is that just of byproduct of change or what?

- I think that Mayor Wharton's effort as the county mayor to come up with a context sensitive solution for the Shelby Farms Parkway was probably a turning point for Shelby Farms Park.

It had been embroiled in controversy for years over many terrible road designs that would've destroyed the park.

There were people who didn't see the value in the public space, who thought it would be better to sell it or develop it.

There were people who believed passionately that it should remain in the public ownership.

Solving the problem with the parkway, coming up with an alignment that was a benefit to the park as opposed to harming the park, I think allowed people for the first time to stop talking about the threats to the park and start talking about the opportunities.

And the conservancy came out of those conversations after we secured a management agreement.

I think people were then ready to start talking about what's possible and what the potential of this space is for the public.

- How often do you have to relive the controversies, or is it pretty distant?

- There are always controversies in public space.

I think my colleagues- - Carol knows nothing about that.

- My colleagues would agree.

- Neither does Tina.

[laughs] - And the scale of the controversies are different.

Some of them are broad public controversies, and these are public spaces, so we should be having public conversations about what happens to them.

None of us own any of these parks any more than any of the rest of us do, which is what's so special about them.

But there are small controversies every day.

People compete for different uses in public space.

There are user groups that don't like other user groups.

There are people that take a lot of ownership of the spaces that they use, which is ultimately a positive thing.

But we do spend a lot of time encouraging people to share in public space, which again, is part of why it matters so much that we have these public spaces where we can have disagreements together on common ground.

- Carol, we had you on the show a couple months ago, marking the grand reopening of the fully redesigned Tom Lee Park.

People can go to wkno.org or go to dailymemphian.com and get a lot of that, so we won't dwell, 'cause your controversies are a little hot still.

You're still in the midst of it.

But let's just talk, first of all, the structure of Memphis River Parks partnership.

It's not an independent, I forget, I lose track.

- Yeah, it's a 501(c)(3).

- It is.

- It is, so, by management agreement we have with the city, we manage and develop public property.

- Right, okay, so totally independent, and it is bigger in the sense that it has multiple parks.

There's been a lot of focus on Tom Lee for good reason.

There's a lot of money spent there, trying to make, we'll talk about Music Fest and Barbecue Fest in a bit, but there are other parks as well that are under your purview.

Tell people about that, just so everyone's on the same page.

- Oh yeah, we manage five miles of riverfront, and it runs from where the Wolf River comes into the Mississippi River at the top of Greenbelt Park and at the beginning, the west end of Wolf River Greenway- - Up near Harbortown, Mud Island.

- Yeah, north end of Mud Island and then we go all the way south of the Memphis Arkansas Bridge to Chickasaw Bluffs Park, so we have a lot of property.

And I think the reason that the organization was originally formed under then Mayor Herenton, was that the city felt this was both an asset for locals, but also for tourists, and the city couldn't invest in it to make the impression it felt like it should be making for tourists, and so... thus the River Parks was created.

- Right, and Overton Park was created, what conservancy, not the park, but the conservancy is maybe a dozen years old, 15 years old?

- Yeah, 2010.

- 2010.

And again, Tina's not here, so I won't try to talk too much, but Nick, the other parks range in size from little corner neighborhood parks to MLK Riverside, south of downtown, a beautiful, beautiful park that too many people don't know about and everything in between.

- Yeah, and actually, I think technically, the largest park is Kennedy Park.

- Okay, yeah, Kennedy, yeah.

- Which is also massive, and thanks to Housing and Community Development and our friends in the Department of Planning and Development, it's undergoing a massive transformation, but that, and Baber Park, which is a little down the road from it.

But yeah, the smallest park is Belvedere Park, which is about the size of this table.

- [indistinct] Now we know.

- That's over the edge of the Medical District, Madison, and I'm trying to remember the two roads that combine, but it is literally an island at the corner of Madison and whatever the road it is that that intersects with.

But yeah, no, it's all over the place, and we stratify them as such.

We talk about pocket parks, which that would fall under.

It's really anything under an acre is a pocket park, neighborhood parks, regional parks, and then, really our three destination parks that we have left are MLK, Audubon, and Kennedy.

When I say left, that are still managed by the city.

But yeah, no, and it runs the gamut.

A hundred and sixty-two parks, a hundred and twenty-ish of those are what we would call active parks where we actually have amenities there.

But you gotta remember, and I'll try not to be too dry with it, but parks generally came from out partials of developers, either by law or by not needing it, because it was undevelopable, land was given to the city as a part of a development, and so- - So, a subdivision's gonna go up.

- Exactly - Triangle, this whatever.

There's some requirement or some necessity that this part of this huge development is gonna be park.

- Yeah, back before the state outlawed it, they were referred to it as impact fees where you had to have an offset from your development.

But anyway, done with the history lesson.

So it means a lot of times they're in floodplains, they're in areas where water needs to be shed from all that development that took place, and so, that is why they are so varied, but yeah, and we manage all of those.

- What is your budget annually?

- Our budget annually, we've actually seen it increase.

When I started in 2018, our budget was around $28 million.

And we're currently at about $49 million, and that's operating.

And capital varies, because it depends upon the bond issuance of the city, - Capital being things, investments in construction, anything from restrooms to- - Ed Rice Community center, Gaisman Community Center, yeah, and so it varies.

- I think the Overton Park annual budget, the conservative budget, around $1 million, something like that, your annual budget is- - 5.6.

- 5.6.

- We're right at five.

- Yeah, and how, one of the real challenges, and it's one of the things that I make the joke about the conservancies, that'll solve everything.

Generally, the conservancies start, I know Overton Park Conservancy started with some amazing, really committed, philanthropically-minded folks, George Cates very much at the heart of that for Overton Park Conservancy, but a need to then generate revenue.

And the thing I always say, I mean, Daily Memphian's a nonprofit, so technically, I run a nonprofit, but we are able to charge, and we appreciate you subscribing, and we are able to charge advertising and do services and events.

And so, we've gotten it to where, when we launched it was 99% philanthropy, and now it's probably 75% philanthropy, and we're trying to get less and less philanthropy, because it's hard, because you're going and asking.

You and I were joking about that before we started.

Your budget is different though, parks are different in that, Overton Park as well, it's a free and open park.

You're not an amusement park.

You can't charge people to come in.

That's counter to the mission.

And so, how do you make that $5 million budget work?

- So our budget structure is a little bit unusual for Park Conservancy, although all Park conservancies are different and all management agreements are different.

For us, the county owns all of the property of the park and of the Green Line as well.

We also manage the Green Line.

And 25% of our funding currently comes from the county.

That's about $1.3 million a year.

Then about 25% is raised through individual contributions, sponsorships, foundations, and 50% of our income is earned revenue, which is unusually high.

Part of the reason that we set up our capital plan and our business plan for that is that it's an enormous park and it takes a lot of money to operate it at a world class level for the citizens.

And so, we have our event center where people have weddings, galas, corporate meetings, things like that.

We earn a lot of our revenue that way from the hospitality services.

We are the landlord to two restaurants, so we earn money that way.

We have some third-party partners in the park, like Go Ape Treetop Adventure, horse stables.

We've got boat rentals, bike rentals, water playground.

But the vast majority of anything that you do at the park or on the Green Line is free and always will be.

- For you, again, about a $5 million budget, you said, operating budget, obviously, tens of millions have been invested in the park lately, but how do you keep up the park?

It's, like you said, what, five miles of riverfront?

Where are those revenue streams?

- We have an annual city allocation that generally has remained flat for years, but we try to segregate our operating expenses and make sure that we only ask the city for the operating expenses, no overhead.

Then we have a no- - Well, operating, since we're already there, that being, how much is that money and what is that?

- Well, it's going into maintenance, cleaning, servicing the parks, so with public sees in the parks.

- And that's about how much a year?

- That's about $3 million a year.

And then we have earned revenue from a number of sources, parking lots, cruise lines, when the river's not like a pond.

[Eric says something indistinctly] That's been frustrating this year and event rentals as well.

So, it's a good model.

We think with Tom Lee, we have an opportunity to increase our event rental income.

But like Jen, you're always saying you only wanna take the park out of commission for a rental a certain amount of time.

So we've actually done a chart to say, "Okay, this feature can only be taken out "this much on a weekend, over the year, this much during the week, over the year," so that we make sure public access is the primary purpose and for our property.

- And with the big investment, I'm gonna come to you with the same question, but the big investment that was just made into Tom Lee Park, does that operating cost, it must go up.

- Well, it's interesting, it goes up, but one of the things we do not have at Tom Lee Park, we have no elevators, we have no escalators, we have no heating, we have no cooling.

We don't have the expenses that are built in, for instance, to the 1982 version of Mud Island.

And even if you look at the landscape plan, over time, that will, because of the natural landscaping, that will be a much reduced landscaping cost versus cutting grass, so, you know, looking- - Wait, really, so wait, the landscaping of the new park will be cheaper than the old park?

- Sure, ultimately, I mean there's lots to take care of, don't misunderstand me, but as it grows in, it is designed to regenerate itself, and we've seen that at River Garden.

- The little park down towards where you go into Bass Pro.

- Yes, exactly.

And so we know that can be done.

I'm sure, Nick, I know you're converting in that way, and you really see it over time that it begins to reduce your cost and of course, creates a much lusher, more robust, not only environment for people, but certainly for pollinators.

- Yeah, the big investment, the Heart of the Park, big, was it $75 million or something like that?

It was a huge investment in the park.

- The Heart of the Park was $52 million.

We've invested about $70 million in capital dollars overall.

That would include the Green Line, the playground, and the Wolf River pedestrian bridge and many, many trees.

- And talk about, again, we're in the wonky stuff, but this is the realities of people love a new park, but they also want to have clean restrooms, and they want to have swings that work, and they want to feel like the lights are on or off.

They want everything to work properly.

So how, as Shelby Farms has invested all that money, how have you been able to keep up with all the operating and maintenance and upkeep?

- We could have a whole discussion about restrooms.

We need a program on restrooms.

- Oh, if Tina were here, she would talk about restrooms, because that is one of the number one things people come up to her, if they know who she is, and they see her in the park, or they see her outside the park, they're like, "Hey, the park is wonderful, but I went by, and that restroom wasn't working over here," and it is a constant challenge.

I know that from having been on the conservancy board.

- Park operations is so hard, because the park rangers and the operations team could do their job perfectly on a day, get everything done, hustle, all projects go well, everything gets checked off the list.

And the best case scenario is that at the end of the day, nobody really notices, and then you have to start over the next day and do it again.

On a peak day, say there's 70 degree weather on a Saturday, we could spend 12 hours a day picking up trash, and that's not any one person but all of us together, removing litter, pulling trash outta trash cans.

It's a huge, huge effort.

But that's part of why we built part of the park the way that we did as the economic engine for the rest of the park.

Because if you want to have a world class space, you have to be able to take care of it in a world class way, and that takes money.

- For you, for the 162 parks, you have the budget you have, the ideal budget would be how much more?

- So the National Recreation and Parks Association says that generally speaking, your operating budget should be around $100 a citizen, which in our case would mean that our operating budget would be about $65 million, doing back of the envelope math there.

So truthfully, that's always what we have said.

Now that also is difficult, because that is averaging big town, small towns.

Minneapolis throws the skew off completely, 'cause it's close to $200 a citizen.

But all that to say, just as a prime example, and I love to celebrate our successes, but I also like to point out some of the difficulties, and just as a number here, we had, when I first started, our operating budget for park operations, which is the code word for the people that pick up the trash, cut the grass and maintain all the facilities, was about $6 million for 162 parks.

Compare that again to the city's allocation to do maintenance at the five miles of the river parks is $3 million.

That means, we always joked, Three million dollars to take care of five parks and $6 million to take care of 162.

That's a unfair comparison, because festivals, large scale events, regional attraction park versus our neighborhood parks.

But, that is one thing I have constantly pushed for is that we increase the city's allocation to do those things, 'cause at the end of the day, we have 100,000 people that use our community centers on a daily basis.

We have close to three quarters, to a million people that drive by our parks.

And so from that perspective, how much we invest in those spaces is huge.

- With seven minutes left here, how much, you mentioned the Green Line, and the Green Line in some ways, to me it seems, you mentioned Wharton, and that, which was a controversial project in the sense that there's an old rail line, it's unused.

How do you get it, getting it out of the railroad's hand, turned into this path and people saying, "Well, no one wants to walk down a path, "a flat asphalt path, and it's gonna be crime ridden or it's gonna be problematic or it's not gonna be kept up."

But in some ways that was the beginning, it seems to me, and you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, of believing that these things could work.

So we've gone from that, whatever it started, the original Green Line was how many miles?

- I wanna say six.

- Six-ish from... Now, you've got the Wolf River Greenway, so it's gonna go from the Mississippi River all the way out to Ghost River beyond.

It links up across the bridge with Mississippi River Parks over there, all of this, the bike lanes and that sort of connectedness, how much is there a virtuous circle for you do you think of the success of Tom Lee, the success of Overton Park, the success of the hundred other sixty parks feeds the success of Shelby Farms?

- I think that is entirely true.

I think every time one of these projects succeeds, or every time Nick is successful in raising the local investment in our city parks, I think the whole public space big picture is elevated, and I think that that's important.

The Green Line to me, you know, I'm not from here, and it was one of the first projects that I got to work on along with a lot of other people and other organizations that were supporting that project before us.

To me, it unleashed a wave of optimism that I did not feel when we started the project.

There was a lot of fear and cynicism and I think a little bit of a low self-esteem about our ability to do something like this, but we did do it, and it works, and people love it.

And of all the complicated things that we've built, I think 12 miles of asphalt in a straight line is probably one of the most beloved things that we've been able to do.

I think that every time we do this, we prove to ourselves that we can do more and that we deserve more in our public space and that we should all expect more.

- Yeah, quick question, who maintains the Green Line?

Is that you?

- We do.

- You all do.

- She does.

- Oh, okay, again, your sense, 'cause you've been involved public spaces for not just the river for... How long have you been with Memphis River Parks now, seven years, eight years?

- Six or seven years.

- It feels longer sometimes?

- Sometimes.

- Sometimes it feels longer?

Is that virtuous circle, I mean, I guess that's happened downtown.

There's a point in which, downtown has its challenges still, but there's been a virtuous circle of development and entertainment and so on.

Do you see that happening coming out of Tom Lee and the changes there?

- Well, I do, and I think Shelby Farms is the example, because I think it showed us what we could do in Memphis.

And so many people, the first reaction they have to Tom Lee is, "I can't believe Memphis did this.

I can't believe I'm in Memphis."

And it's like, no, believe it, this is Memphis.

Shelby Farms is Memphis.

That's what we can do.

And so, I think just giving people in Memphis the belief that we can make a promise, it's an ambitious promise.

We can fulfill that promise, and that just shows we can do other things, and we need that positive energy, that belief, that belief in ourselves and what we're capable of doing.

So, absolutely, it's a virtuous circle.

- With just a couple minutes left here and as I said at the top of the show, we had Carol on a month, six weeks ago, when the park opened and talked a lot about the controversies, and we've reported on the controversies, and we're not gonna go there today.

There's still some unanswered questions with Music Fest, Barbecue Fest.

There's unanswered questions.

Email me.

I mean, right, there's a new music festival coming.

There's things that people will say, "Hey, you didn't ask her about this."

It's still hot and heated.

We're not gonna talk about it today.

We've talked about that with Carol many times over the years as this park has been developed, and we'll continue to cover it at The Daily Memphian.

But with a couple minutes left, for each of you, we have a new mayor.

I'll start with you, put you in the really awkward position.

We just had Paul Young, Mayor-elect Paul Young on last week.

What do you want to see for parks from the new mayor?

- I would say that truthfully, and this is my personal opinion as Nick Walker, citizen of Memphis, that I'm very excited.

Both my wife and I voted for him, and I told him during his campaign that I was very excited, because he has an understanding from his time as Housing and Community Development Director, how you talk about a virtuous cycle that we have to invest in ourselves.

We joke all the time, and I joke, it's ugly when we talk about people voting with their tail lights.

And I think it's time as a city that we say, "We are invested in ourselves.

We can do these great things."

We just spent $75 million on parks' facilities, and parks themselves.

Ottoman Park is amazing.

If you have not been by there, you need to drive by and see what we have done.

And I think that type of thing is really why parks are a quality-of-life division, and I think he gets that, and I think the administration gets that, and I'm fully excited to see what they're gonna do with that mantle.

- What do you wanna see from the new mayor?

- The new mayor is on my board, which is great.

- So you know him.

- We do know him.

We think very highly of him.

We've been working with him for, I don't know, probably a decade since he was at Shelby County.

And I know from personal experience that he understands that parks are not just nice-to-haves in a city, they're part of our critical infrastructure, and they should be thought of that way, invested in that way, managed that way.

And I believe that he will prioritize public space in Memphis.

- Same question to you, what do you wanna see from Paul?

- I certainly agree with what Nick and Jen have said, particularly around river parks.

I believe that we have a real advantage with Paul, or with our new mayor, because he understands that the riverfront needs to leverage downtown and downtown development.

And so the connectivity between the two is not good today.

We've tried to make it better with our Cutbank Bluff at Tom Lee, but there's so much more to be done at the riverfront in terms of just the connections back into the city and north and south.

And I think as a planner, Paul gets that, and he understands the context for these projects and what they ought to be leveraging.

- That is all the time we have this week.

Thank you all for being here.

Sorry that Tina Sullivan couldn't be here from Overton Park.

We had Paul Young on last week.

You can get that at wkno.org, and I believe it's next week or the week after, we have two parts show with Jim Strickland.

We'll talk to him about all kinds of things over his eight years as mayor, including parks and public spaces, so be looking for that.

But that is all the time we have this week.

Join us again next week.

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