Pensacola Mayor Ashton Hayward will seek public input for the new community center in one of the city’s most popular parks.
The City of Pensacola is undertaking the building of a new Community Resource Center at Bayview Park. Caldwell Associates Architects has been hired to plan and design the new facility. Please join us to provide your input about what types of uses and functions to include in the building, and to share your ideas about how to make this project a tremendous new addition to the great benefits of living in Pensacola.
All interested citizens and park users are welcome.
Bayview Community Resource Center
Public Input Meeting
Date: Tuesday, May 30th
Time: 6 p.m. – 8 p.m.
Location: Bayview Senior Center, 2000 E. Lloyd Street
The meeting is the same night as Councilwoman Sherri Myers’ town hall on Carpenter’s Creek, which will also be 6 p.m. on Tuesday, May 30 at Asbury Place behind Cokesbury on 9th Avenue.
By the way, a 2011 city plan says that the new Community Center should “not” be built at Bayview Park. The recommendation in the study is to renovate and expand the current Senior Center. Like Hayward, District 4 Councilman Larry Johnson lives in walking distance of Bayview Park. Johnson repeatedly says that the city has to stop ignoring its own plans. However, when the Bayview Park plan was tossed in his face, he said it was a bad plan. Johnson later told me (March 2016 in Sam’s Club) that the city’s African-American community want the new Community Center built at Bayview Park. He made that statement in the context of saying that he was the city’s strongest advocate for the city’s African-American community, that there was no leadership on the 7th floor of city hall and that the public was urging him to run for Mayor in 2018 and he was going to do so. When the issue of the city’s lack of proper maintenance for the city’s parks came up during Parks & Recreation Department Director Brian Cooper’s visit to our Scenic Heights Neighborhood Association last Thursday, he emphasized that his department is not given enough money in the budget to do what needs to be done. Anyone who been to Hitzman Park knows that problems that needed to be fixed in 2008 still need to be fixed, etc. Cooper was especially proud of the future Community Center at Bayview Park. It seems ironic that the city wants to shut down Morris Court Park, that there is no community center in District 2 and only one senior center in a city with a high percentage of seniors. As example, in District 1 more than half of the voters are older than 50, etc. What the City Council needs to do is hit the PAUSE button and appoint a group of citizens to independently assess the city’s Parks & Recreation needs.