Opinion: Milton another powerful reminder of the importance of resiliency in Florida

I planned to write something about Scenic Jacksonville holding its fifth annual Great Cities Symposium this week.

In the past, speakers have come to Jacksonville and talked about what they’ve done in Charleston, Chattanooga, Tampa, Cincinnati and Sarasota — particularly how they’ve transformed the riverfronts in those cities.

This year Carol Coletta was going to talk about Memphis, nearly six miles of public property along the Mississippi River and a new park that attracted 1 million visitors in its first year.

Like a lot of things this week, Hurricane Milton had other plans. Organizers postponed the event. They hope to reschedule it for early next year.

I thought about shifting to another topic but decided to stick with this one — and not just because I’d already had a phone conversation with Coletta, CEO of Memphis Riverfront Parks Partnership, catching her while she was out for a hike Sunday afternoon.

With another hurricane affecting Florida, it seems fitting to think about resiliency. That’s something each of the Great Cities Symposium speakers has talked about.

In their cities, they haven’t just built riverfronts with sunny days in mind — although that’s also part of it.

In the case of Memphis, when the $61 million construction of Tom Lee Park began in 2020, the 31-acre piece of land that stretches about a mile along the Mississippi had about 50 trees on it. When the park opened a year ago, in addition to man-made structures — playgrounds, artwork, pavilions, paths, a Ben & Jerry’s — there were about 1,000 trees.

“And we had to fight for every one of them,” Coletta said. “When you build any public space, particularly one as ambitious as this one, there is a challenge to balance some of the interests.”

Before continuing to describe the park, she added: “By the way, those are battles worth fighting.”

The park isn’t just a place for people to gather. And those trees aren’t just for beauty and shade. About 300 of them are oak species, chosen partly because of their role in flood plains and the ecosystem.

In recent years, the Mississippi River has been affected by another side of climate change: drought.

“We have been plagued recently more by low water than high water,” Coletta said. “But absolutely, one must plan for resilience, for regeneration and for sustainability.”

People in Memphis still have memories of historic flooding a decade ago. And when local leaders unveiled a $13 million flood mitigation initiative this summer, it was described as making “room for the river.”

Adding greenspace wasn’t just about beautification — it was about preparation and protection.

Last year the Urban Land Institute did a report titled “Parks That Protect.” It highlighted what it described as “leading-edge waterfront park projects” in Singapore, the Netherlands, Boston, San Francisco, New Jersey, Cincinnati and Detroit — a riverfront I wrote about after visiting my sister in Michigan this summer.

In Jacksonville, we’ve devoted more time and resources to resiliency in recent years, particularly since the flooding of Hurricane Irma surprised us in 2017. And we’ve at least been able to say the words “climate change,” which is more than some state leaders seem capable of doing.

But we also have continued a century-long process of altering the river, deepening it and straightening it, making the city even more vulnerable to storm surge and flooding. And while Jacksonville now has a chief resilience officer and a 294-page master plan for long-term resiliency, we also seem to keep coming up with plans to put massive buildings on the riverfront.

Our embarrassment of riches

Coletta makes a point to say that every riverfront is different. That was one of the things she planned to touch on while visiting Jacksonville. There is no one magic way to instantly transform a place.

Memphis came up with a plan for its riverfront in 1924, then ignored and neglected it for much of the next century — at one point even using part of the riverfront as a dump.

If you had visited Memphis not all that long ago, Coletta says you would’ve found a riverfront with a patchwork of disconnected parks, one with a Confederate statue, all with little ambition to their design, few amenities and, as a result, few people.

Over the last decade, that changed quickly and dramatically. The Chicago-based Studio Gang was hired to create a master plan for the riverfront. New York-based SCAPE became the landscape architect and design team for the renovated Tom Lee Park — named after a Memphis man who couldn’t swim but saved 32 people when a sternwheeler capsized in the Mississippi in 1925.

In a six-year span, they completed four major projects, on budget and on time. This summer they broke ground on the Memphis Flyway, scheduled to open in 2026 as the only free and ADA-accessible observation deck on the Mississippi.

She mentions several keys to the transformation — the design, the management, the continuing goal of having safe and welcoming places for everyone — but she keeps coming back to one element in particular. Connectivity.

To be successful, the previously disconnected pieces of the riverfront had to be connected, and the riverfront had to be connected to downtown and nearby neighborhoods.

She describes Jacksonville as having “an embarrassment of riches” with our waterfront — and says we just need to connect those riches, make the most of them.

Calm before Milton

When I stepped outside Tuesday morning, it was so beautiful it almost gave me the chills. And not just because the air was cooler.

I remember waking up in South Florida the morning before Hurricane Andrew hit. I lived in Tampa at the time but was covering a preseason NFL game in Miami, staying in a hotel in Fort Lauderdale. I woke up to the sound of an alarm and an announcement that the hotel was going to be evacuated that day.

When I stepped onto the balcony, it was sunny and the air was still. Whenever I hear the phrase “the calm before the storm,” I think of that morning. I flew back to Tampa and watched on TV as Andrew made landfall.

In that storm, Tampa felt like a safe place. It was tempting to feel like it always would be a safe place, that the big hurricanes were destined to hit elsewhere.

This week friends in Tampa are evacuating. Again.

It’s one of those weeks with so many mixed emotions. I’m hopeful that we will avoid the brunt of this massive storm. I’m also worried about the places and people that will not.

mwoods@jacksonville.com

(904) 359-4212

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Opinion: Milton another powerful reminder of the importance of resiliency in Florida