Delaware Greenways: From protest group to open space advocate

Managing Director David Hunt on the evolution of Delaware Greenways

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It’s easy to forget things that never were, but often it’s those very things that set off a sequence of events that have a lasting impact.

Twenty-five years ago, a real estate developer came forward with a proposal to build a regional shopping mall on the Rock Manor Golf Course, just north of Wilmington, between Interstate 95 and Concord Pike.

The project had some notable supporters, including political leaders in the city of Wilmington, which owned the land. Some saw the mall as a pot of gold capable of generating tax revenues desperately needed to replenish the city’s cash-starved coffers.

Gail Van Gilder, who had recently moved to Forest Hills Park, a quiet wooded community within walking distance of the golf course, didn’t like the idea. She went to a public hearing, listened to others speak against the project and joined forces with a new friend, Edith Carlson, to start a new group, the Rock Manor Park Preservation Council.

The mall was never built, but the organization Van Gilder and Carlson created has grown from a protest group into a respected statewide advocate for open space preservation, sustainable land use and healthy and active lifestyles.

It’s called Delaware Greenways.

“It has grown in ways I never imagined,” says Van Gilder, who through the years served the organization she founded as president, executive director and board member.

The secret, she says, “is to be proactive rather than reactive, to work with people in a positive way rather than to be negative.”

So, after setting up the Rock Manor Park Preservation Council, Van Gilder, Carlson and their allies did more than go to meeting after meeting to make the case against the mall. Picking up on a national movement to encourage municipalities to convert narrow strips of open space into pedestrian and bicycle paths, they developed the idea for a ribbon of trails that would loosely wrap around Wilmington’s northern borders like a necklace, stretching from the Delaware River to Brandywine Park.

They called it the Northern Delaware Greenway, and they wanted it to run through the golf course, right where the developers wanted to build their mall.

“Edith and I were just learning to use computers. We did maps, with overlays, superimposing what the greenway would look like. We did a brochure, called ‘Picture a Park.’ We tried to take a positive approach, emphasizing that we were for a park, more than just opposing a shopping center,” she says.

Their ideas gained support, right up to the office of Gov. Mike Castle.

And, while it wasn’t easy, the strands of the necklace were finally connected, from the river through Fox Point and Bellevue state parks, through Bringhurst Woods and Rockwood Park, along Talley Road into Rock Manor, under Concord Pike (as part of the massive highway reconstruction related to the AstraZeneca expansion a decade ago), over to Alapocas Woods and finally to the Brandywine.

As those pieces fit together, the organization evolved, broadening its mission and changing its name twice, first to the Delaware Greenways Council and then to just Delaware Greenways, primarily, Van Gilder says, to avoid confusion with a greenways council set up within state government.

According to Steve Borleske, who succeeded Bob Valihura as the organization’s president in 2006, “we moved from the entrepreneurial stage with Gail, to an organization that was growing up and broadening its pursuits.”

During that growth period, Greenways started advocating for pedestrian and bike trails throughout the state, spearheaded the effort to have the area along Kennett Pike and Route 52 recognized as both a state and national scenic byway and began the drive to create two more scenic byways in the state, the Bayshore Byway along Route 9 from New Castle to south of Dover and another in the Lewes area.

In the last three or four years, it has expanded its mission to include health and wellness, and advocacy for sustainable communities. A focal point of the sustainability effort is Greenways’ partnership with the Trustees of the New Castle Common to revitalize the 112 acres at historic Penn Farm.

“It’s been a very continuous and growing agenda, rather than abrupt changes from year to year,” Borleske says.

“We’ve made a conscious effort in the last five years to become a statewide organization,” says Peter Walsh, who succeeded Borleske as president in 2012.  “And consider the diversity — the difference between the folks we work with in the bayshore towns and those we work with on the scenic byway in Greenville, and the folks we’re working with in Lewes. And we’re still getting to know the New Castle folks, and they think very uniquely.”

“Greenways has evolved from a protest movement to a network of ongoing partnerships,” says Managing Director David Hunt, who leads a staff of five full-time employees from its office on Rockland Road, just a few hundred feet from the Northern Delaware Greenway trail.

“Unlike a lot of other organizations, we have one foot in with the public and one foot in state and local government,” Borleske says.

Greenways works regularly with government officials at all levels. Within state government, it works most closely with parks, environmental and transportation officials, and sometimes with tourism and economic development. In the nonprofit arena, it collaborates often with organizations like the Delaware Center for Horticulture, the Delaware Nature Society, Bike Delaware and the Conservation Fund. Its projects also result in close ties with municipal governments and community groups, like those in the many small towns along Route 9 that are part of the Delaware’s Bayshore Byway.

Delaware Greenways’ transportation planner Jeff Greene on the future of the Route 9 Corridor

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Because its role varies from project to project, it is not always easy to define what Greenways does. It doesn’t build trails (or anything else), nor does it maintain them. But it advocates for the goals it believes in and makes sure there’s a plan in place to sustain whatever is created over the long haul.

Hunt puts it this way: “We are able to engage the community and the key stakeholders on one side and the implementing agencies on the other, and allow those two constituencies to understand each other and make the right decisions.”

Often, says Jeff Greene, the organization’s transportation planner, the work involves serving as a translator or interpreter, for example, by helping communities express their wishes to the state Department of Transportation and then converting the response of traffic engineers from their professional jargon into language laypeople can easily understand.

Working in the middle, Hunt says, is an effective way of adding value — both to the community and to government agencies.

Linda Ratchford, president of the New Castle City Council, praises Greenways for its success in planning, especially for “capturing synergies” as they bring diverse groups together.

Although tourism isn’t an integral part of Greenways’ mission, Sarah Willoughby, executive director of the Greater Wilmington Convention and Visitors Bureau, sees the organization as an essential partner.

“I look at them as building the product for tourism. They’re protecting the land; they’re protecting the beauty, the open space. They were largely responsible for the Brandywine Scenic Byway,” she says. “We [the convention and visitors bureau] don’t create products. We promote products. For tourism to succeed, you need people like Delaware Greenways that have the tools and the capacity to make the product.”

Even so, Walsh acknowledges that Greenways often conducts its work in relative anonymity. While the group may be known to civic leaders and government policymakers, one of its greatest challenges, he says, is that “there are hundreds of people who walk the greenways we were instrumental in developing and if you asked them they would say they had never heard of Delaware Greenways.”

While Walsh wouldn’t mind seeing an uptick in awareness, what matters more is support for the group’s objectives.

“For the most part,” he says, “people will embrace what we stand for. People are supportive of greenways in general, and of connecting key places for public use. And that’s the core of what we’ve been about from the start.”