Participants Guide: Enjoy Opportunities and Challenges

The Envision Participant Guide provides an in-depth exploration of the opportunities and challenges which may shape the future of Prince George’s County. At the heart of the Participant guide and the Envision initiative in general are six Envision areas – live, work, learn, enjoy, serve, and sustain, which provide a framework to examine the parts of life in the county we hope to impact. Today we begin to examine the ENJOY Envision area, specifically, how we review the opportunities and challenges:

Opportunities

• Promote cultural assets and heritage tourism better.
• Build trail connections to places of work and play.
• Build “complete streets,” streets that are designed for all users to include amenities such as enhanced public transit services, sidewalks, crosswalks, pedestrian amenities, and sidewalk connections with neighborhoods, places of work and retail, and recreational spots.
• Promote more public art including projects that are interactive and educational.
• Attract artists to the Gateway Arts District with flexible regulations.
• Partner with colleges and universities to expand recreational, music, and art activities and engage the colleges in service learning.
• Preserve existing historic community assets, parks, and buildings.
• Capitalize on the National Children’s Museum to open in National Harbor in 2013 and projected to attract 600,000 visitors per year.
• Capitalize on the existence of strong faith based organizations as resources.

Challenges

• Revenue downturn makes it difficult to maintain and expand facilities and open space.
• Concerns about public safety and crime deter visitors to parks and other recreational activities.
• Competition for scarce tourist and recreational dollars in a region with so many options.
• Inadequate intracounty public transportation system.
• Maintaining the current high level of parks and recreation service as the county grows.
• Lack of significant entertainment venues in the county causing residents to find venues outside of the county.

For much more background on our county, please download and review the EnvisionParticipant Guide (note: This is a large 2MB PDF file), and look for many more Participant Guide excerpts here at the Envision blog.

Please take a moment to vote on your favorite idea in this weeks online forum. This weeks forum seeks priorities for visions for the future of Prince George’s County in two areas: ENJOY and SERVE