Roberto ClementePark Wins
Phoenix Award For Community Impact
LANCASTER County, PA (NOV.10, 2009) – RevitalizedRobertoClementePark in the City of Lancaster has won the Phoenix Award for Community Impact.
The award winning park was the result of public and private collaboration by the South Duke Street Neighborhood Task Force, the Inner City Group, the Lancaster County Planning Commission, High Companies, Weed & Seed, U.S. EPA Region III, and Environmental Standards Inc.
Roberto Clemente Park, once an underutilized and neglected site in the
South Duke Streetneighborhood, today is considered to be an asset to the community. This public recreational space features an attractive and well maintained park and a new playground for children.
For the first time, awards are being presented for two years because the national brownfields conference is now on an 18-month cycle with award winners being named for 2008 and 2009. The Phoenix Award winners represent outstanding revitalization projects from each of the 10 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regions as well as projects having a special community impact. The winning projects were specially selected by a panel of environmental professionals and business and government leaders based on a set of five criteria: magnitude of the project, innovative techniques, solutions to regulatory issues, solutions to social issues, and impact upon the community.
RobertoClementePark was announced as the 2008 winner of the Community Impact Award. The park was completed in 2005.
The 2008 and 2009 project participants will be honored at an awards ceremony during Brownfields 2009 in New Orleans, La., November 16-18, 2009. During the environmental conference with an expected crowd of 5,000 participants, these Phoenix Award winners will showcase their projects with case study presentations and exhibit information.
“Without the community involvement process, the project would not have been successful,” said Jane Pugliese, director of Housing and Economic Development Planning for the Lancaster County Planning Commission (LCPC) and former executive director of the Inner City Group. “There’s no substitute for having a good community process for deciding what needs to happen at a site. If we had gone ahead and just improved RobertoClementePark without input from the neighborhood, by now, the park would have deteriorated back to a blighted condition because the neighborhood would not have had any sense of ownership of the park. Because the neighborhood was a decisive force in deciding what improvements were to be made and how it was going to be managed, the park has continued to be a well maintained recreational area and neighborhood asset used by all.”
