This idea about how we build places together for us to share.

And I know several of you are at the 40 and 10 um release night.

So I will we will try not to repeat everything, but we do have a similar presentation to the one we did that night that we're just gonna kind of go through as as well.

And you know, we very much start off, and I think all of us are familiar with the fact that we currently have some real like class A like parks amenities in the city of Bethlehem and between Memorial Pool, Fairview Park, uh Sauken Park, the Rose Garden, like we've worked very hard.

Uh, and Mr.

Alcall has been doing this for 30 years across four administrations to build public spaces that reflect this idea of investment.

And, you know, I think it's important that we start at the beginning about like why do we care about this and who are we doing this for?

And a park is one of the places that we're supposed to share.

We're supposed to share literal space, share conversation, share the sense of community.

And we want parks to represent the diversity of our uh of our community.

So parks are not designed for only wealthy people.

We are designing parks, we're designing our uh amenities for everybody to be able to come and to choose to want to come.

Not that it's a last resort to use, but rather like this is a place that takes tax dollars and invests in a common space for people that live within the city of Bethlehem, no matter who they are, and and and I know that is a that is a belief that all of you that are here currently share about what the purpose is of the public good.

Um, and also I won't won't repeat this too much, but uh just as a reminder, uh, 12 days from now, we are cutting the ribbon on Friendship Park.

Um, so a one week from Saturday at uh 3 p.m., we are kicking off our annual block party with a ribbon cutting for a truly transformational project.

And I know um uh councilwoman uh Laird, you have been uh intimately involved with Northside Alive over the years.

Um, but it's a project that we have spent um a couple of years now seeking the grant funding for working through uh, you know, Mr.

Alcall and his team deserve a tremendous amount of credit and working through all of those different logistics as far as surveys and rights of ways and understanding where utilities are.

But 12 days from now, we're gonna cut the ribbon on what is just going to be a fantastic park with a water feature.

And one of the things that we're trying to do, similar to as we've talked about with Broad Street and other other areas, is basically just kind of set a baseline for what is possible when everybody is kind of moving in the same direction.

Um, and uh we'll talk more obviously that day about Friendship Park, but it's gonna be a huge day for us.

Um, it's gonna be a huge day for the for the neighborhood.

Um, and you know, it's it's an example in Dutco Park, I was just checking with Mike, um, is going to be done sometime within the next month, which is a big part of our choice neighborhood.

It was our initial implementation project, um having to do with that $500,000 choice neighborhood planning grant that we got through the federal government.

And I think all of us have probably driven by there hundreds, if not thousands of times.

And we've you generally don't see anybody in there.

And I think in all my times going to the boys and girls club over all the years when I was a kid and as an adult, like I don't know if I ever saw one person like hanging out in that public space.

And as we are working through the overall choice neighborhood plan, um, that's really gonna be a great project.

And one of the things I think it was last time that council had voted on the resolution having to do with uh uh the the some of the planning dollars having to do with Stefko Boulevard.

Um and Dutco is going to um hopefully help to build some of that momentum and that people are gonna drive by there and see people there and understand that it's not just an institutional space, but it's a place where people go.

And we're hopeful that that has an effect on some of the traffic issues in that area.

Um, but that's an area that we are we are looking at um in depth coming forward.

Um, so why do parks matter?

And I'm gonna turn this over to Kathy in a second, but you know, once again, as you know, six of the other people in this community that understand this, there are parks, these are parks for everyone.

And we very much look at our our most important job is how do you build things for everybody that build connections between people and create common experiences.

It's very easy in this job and in other jobs within the government to respond to self-interest and to respond to the loudest people.

And we very much look at our park system as the opposite of that.

We are grounding the idea, the concepts of equity.

We are grounding the concepts of opportunity, and we are grounding the concepts that this is about the entire city of Bethlehem and this idea that like when you go to a park, like people generally have the same experience, which I think is a positive.

Like you can't buy your way into a better experience in a park.

It is shared by all of us.

And I think all of us have experienced that in different ways.

Um, and we're excited to talk about where we are going over the over the next year and over the next 10 years as well as a city.

And with that being said, I'm going to turn it over to Kathy and Corey to kind of talk about the next stages of the of the plan.

Thank you.

So, you know, this was really a community-driven process, and we'll really go over that as we uh progress through the next slides.

But this screen is really to show you, you know, what we heard from the community, and just to highlight a couple of them.

There's beautiful, accessible community.

You know, parks are a lot of things to a lot of people, and we really needed to keep that in mind as we moved through this process.

So in case you didn't know, we are looking to do 40 parks in the next 10 years.

Um we were grounding them in some core goals as we were identifying what our priorities were, how we were actually going to be implementing this, and just to highlight those, um, we are looking to connect our parks to have accessible places for play, to increase active recreation, strengthen our programming, create climate resiliency, and then look into our maintenance and invest in that.

Oops.

So I wanted to walk you through what our process was.

And it took a little over a year to do this.

Um, but again, wanted just to highlight how much in community engagement happened and how we were bringing the community along the entire time.

And we are looking to continue that as we are implementing the plan each year when we are bringing out new parks to actually go through design and construction.

We will be doing additional community outreach just to make sure that everything that was established in this plan is still accurate, still still the direction that we want to go.

So just to highlight the process, um, started with data analysis, looking at existing conditions, talking about you know, issue areas, things to think about addressing, and then going into different phases of planning, and really that's just the level of detail that they're looking at each park, trying to align goals with uh the community's you know, needs that were identified, and then all the way to the final report, which is now online and live, and you can look at.

Um, so through this time, there was a steering committee.

Um, we met three times, as well as three virtual public meetings, 15 pop-ups.