West Michigan has a multitude of outdoor adventuring opportunities. Join Lynne she chats with Sam Moore, executive director of the Kent County Parks Foundation for this week’s edition of Money, I’m Home.

 

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0:00:06.9 Lynne Jarman-Johnson (LJJ): Money, I’m Home. Welcome in. I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson, with Consumers Credit Union. And today we have all these topics for you from finance to fitness. We’re going to head outdoors today. Sam Moore, is the Executive Director of the Kent County Parks Foundation. Sam, thanks so much for being with us.

0:00:23.3 Sam Moore (SM): Thanks, Lynne. Thanks for having me.

0:00:24.6 LJJ: Hey, listen. I just want to say a big shoutout, congrats. We had a wonderful event held. We call it, Something’s Grilling. The last time that we had this a couple years ago, a tornado came through Kent County, if you remember. Oh my goodness. [chuckle]

0:00:42.0 SM: Yeah. I do. How could you forget that night?

0:00:43.2 LJJ: I actually can remember being under the tables, which was a first in my life. It was crazy. The Something’s Grilling, is held at Millennial Park. In which, I think it’s something that’s really unique that many people often ask me about the park, because still, I think it’s a silent wonder. Even though now it’s how many years old?

0:01:02.4 SM: Sure. Well, it’d be 21 years old since the inception of it. It opened about 15 years ago. But it really is this… It’s a hidden gem, per se. But, it’s one of the largest urban parks in the country. It’s larger than Central Park in New York. Over 1400 acres. And so we have this special place just a hop, skip and a jump from downtown.

0:01:24.4 LJJ: Well, and I love the fact that it’s not only a park in the sense of, you can picnic and enjoy, but the lake that is there, the beach, the splash pad. It’s just an amazing place. The Kent County Parks Foundation has so much to do with making sure that our parks stay, A, in good shape, but also a vision of connecting our outdoors to us. And I think that, Sam, you as the leader have just done tremendous things for collaboration in our area. Tell us about some things that you’re most proud of.

0:02:00.3 SM: Yeah. When you look around at the park system and what our natural resources are, so in 2016, Grand Action did a destination asset study to look at what are the assets in the region. And one of the things that came out of this study was that West Michigan under-performs in the outdoor adventure and tourism market. And we’re not used to that in West Michigan. Most of our items in West Michigan over-perform the national average, and that’s the way we like it. It’s why we live here. We want it to be one of the best places to live, and work, and raise a family. And so when you look at our parks and our infrastructure, especially coming off of the pandemic when everyone was forced to stay at home, everyone was forced to adapt to the Zooms and the WebEx, and all the online platforms that you have, and so the parks and trail network became this vital piece for all of our individuals, from CEO, middle managers, down to janitors to every area in the employment sector were out using our parks. Our growth was absolutely explosive. Three and four times the amount of normal people who are out visiting our parks. And so, it’s really been this great exposure that a lot of folks that are involved in the Parks Foundation and are our donors have found new parks in their neighborhoods. So they made it a point to go out and find these places.

0:03:15.2 SM: And so what we’re doing at the Parks Foundation is, How do we make sure we have enough land throughout the county for future parks? How can we connect our parks via the trails? The trails are becoming increasingly important. And then I think what one of the things you’re going to see in the coming years is water trails. When the Whitewater gets done in the downtown, we’ve got miles and miles and miles of other rivers throughout the county and throughout the whole region. How do they become activated on each end of the Whitewater stretch? And the Kent County Park system can be those great trail heads. We’ve identified 10 different spots along five different rivers throughout the county. In the future, you’re going to start to hear about that. It’s more than just these non-motorized trails, it’s water trails as well. And so, there’s a lot of moving parts in the park system and it really is about employee retention for employers. Are we providing the quality of life for our employees that want to stay here? We’re getting a lot of transplants from Chicago, and St. Louis, and other areas around the Midwest. Do we have the amenities and the different things that hold them here? And in many cases, we do, but in that outdoor adventure sector, we don’t. That’s one of our focuses. What role do we play as a park system in making sure that we have all these amenities that become not only good for our citizens to use, but an attraction point?

0:04:36.9 LJJ: Yeah. You mentioned the Whitewater Project. And what is interesting to me is how involved, Sam, you are. The foundation isn’t the owner, per se, of the parks. We work in hand-in hand with the Kent County Parks system and the wonderful team over there. How much is collaboration on all of these major projects that are happening in Kent County right now?

0:05:01.7 SM: Collaboration and cooperation are the two key words. And it’s the way it’s got to be. Because if any one of these entities operates in a silo, we’re not effective. One of the priorities that we’re working with the City of Grand Rapids, is finishing the River Edges Trail. From Leonard Street to Anne Street, and from the Blue Bridge to the Oxford Trail. Once those two pieces are completed, now we’ll have a trail network with the Grand River Greenway in Ottawa County, that you will be able to take your bike from downtown Grand Rapids all the way to Lake Michigan and Grand Haven. You’ll be able to go up north through Muskegon. How do we connect it into The White Pine trail? We’re looking at, are there new legs that we need? Do you need to get out to Lowell and eventually to Lansing? Can we get down to Kalamazoo? Can Grand Rapids be this hub with all these spokes that go out, and then we have all these small regional trails within the townships? How do they then connect into these main trunk lines? What we’ll find is that development will pop up around it. There can be companies like little hubs of activities. It may be food trucks, it may be the outdoor social zones that you have in downtown. Along the route to Grand Haven, there’s a couple of bars and restaurants, and people are known to stop and grab a Bloody Mary on their way.

0:06:09.0 SM: There’s different things that can happen around these. We’re looking at, how do we activate in the winter? Last winter, we groomed trails within Millennium Park, for cross-country skiing. At the Palmer Golf Course, there’s trails for cross-country skiing there as well. How do we activate in the winter? And so there’s a lot of different things we can do. But the collaboration and cooperation between the city, the county, Downtown Grand Rapids Inc., Grand Rapids White Water, all of our township partners, the cities, villages and townships in the outlying area, and so we really are working with all of them to make sure we’re working together for the same common mission. And I think that we’re on the cusp of several exciting developments in that front, and especially along the trails and water trails, that I think will really help with the missing connectivity piece, and will become a true destination.

0:07:00.8 LJJ: You bring up Millennium Park again, and I just want to do a shout out and also a nod to the individual who really made this possible for us, and unfortunately Peter Secchia passed away this past year. Just a genuinely caring individual who looked at what we had, what I would call that coal that is waiting to become a diamond, and I know Sam, he’s a very dear friend of yours. Tell us how you feel because we have the opportunity to say thank you to Peter, at Something’s Grilling, which is so important. But from you as a friend, it has to be awe-inspiring to see really what was created and is continuing to be a legacy.

0:07:47.7 SM: Yeah, so, I was so fortunate to have him as a mentor and an incredible 20-year friendship. For him, he’s a visionary, I mean the man could vision things and see things into the future that were just really inspiring. You look at the Medical Mile, and locating Grand Valley’s Healthcare Facility, Spectrum’s expansion, the Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital, and then he landed the big one, Michigan State University Medical School and Secchia Center. And now we’re seeing an MSU Research Center pop up, and recently Perrigo relocated their North American headquarters downtown, and it truly is becoming this epicenter for healthcare. He was insistent, it must be called the Medical Mile, and you have to create the Van Andel Institute and their expansion up there, and so many things. It’s the largest concentration of employers in our core downtown. And he was the visionary behind that conception of how can we really enhance Grand Rapids and make it known for its healthcare?

0:08:47.1 SM: The same thing on Millennium Park, 20+ years ago, he was the driving force and the vision behind, How do we think big? How do we give the community a gift in the new millennium, in 2000, and what is it and what does it look like? And so, he went to work and got the state to partner and help acquire the land, the county and the city, to put in money in it to become a county park, he wanted to coordinate. It’s near the city of Walker, a portion of it is in the city of Walker and the City of Grandville and the City of Wyoming are all right there.

0:09:20.4 SM: And how do they play a role in making it feel like it’s their neighborhood park? The donor community, the donors stepped up and they’ve invested over $20 million into Millennium Park over the last 20 years to make it this true gem. How many students have not been to Lake Michigan? To solve that, he brought in Lake Michigan Beach sand for the Millennium Park Beach, so it’s this beautiful beach, but then he enhanced that and created a program where Grand Rapids Public School students get to go to Lake Michigan and experience Lake Michigan. He takes some of the GRPS students to East Lansing for a football game or a basketball game, so that they can experience the sports culture and hopefully inspire them to want to go to college. There were so many areas. It was just so fascinating in all of the areas that he touched, he wasn’t just out there saying, “Do this.” He led by example. And when he jumped in, he jumped in with both feet, both hands, his whole body, he was all in, he was relentless. He was absolutely relentless in pursuing his vision. And when you look at our community as a whole, our community is better off, because he was just such a driving force.

0:10:32.0 SM: After he passed away, I received several bankers boxes full of all of his memos from Millennium Park. And you read them, and they’re absolutely hysterical. He’s writing the large donors in town, one of the memos said, “I just toured this person out here. They told me you must see it. Do you have time next week to be out here?” Now, these are CEOS running their companies, who are traveling the globe trying to run their businesses, and he’s giving them 48 hours to get out there, to tour the park. Yes. And he was relentless in it, and if they didn’t respond, eventually he’d go visit them, he would find them and he would get them out there and he would get the check. But by doing it, they could see the vision.

0:11:14.3 SM: If you just looked at it, Millennium Park was an undesirable area of town. It was old gravel pits and often became many little landfills of individuals dumping their trash out there. It just was not a very desirable area of town, he just was masterful at having that vision and that foresight of what could be, and I think that’ll be the one thing that we will miss the most, is that those next visionaries that drive us towards that goal. We’re still not done with Millennium Park. We still have areas of it that we can develop, and we still have some properties to acquire. And so we’re now 21 years in, and so I think our goal is, can we now kind of wrap it up at around the 25-year mark? In the next couple of years can we accomplish some of the things that we wanted to see? Most people are not that relentless to spend 20 years on something, and all the moving pieces and the different negotiations and getting everyone excited about it. To me, that was the most exciting part, and the donors continue to be involved even after he’s gone because they love the vision, they bought into the vision. His excitement was contagious.

0:12:17.8 LJJ: Well, and Sam, anybody who’s listening can have that same contagious volunteer attitude with the Park’s Foundation. How can people get involved?

0:12:29.1 SM: One of the items that we’re looking at for the future is, how can you, in a way, adopt your own neighborhood park or create a little friends group at your neighborhood park to be involved? Go to kcpf.org, kentcountyparksfoundation.org, both work, but kpcf.org, and you can look at all of the different parks that we have and the trails that we have. You can make a donation. You can just request more information and ask to get involved. There’s multiple ways to get involved in our park system. Ginny Sines, runs our volunteer program at the Kent County Parks Department, and she’s just a stellar volunteer coordinator with the different activities that we have going on. Whether it’s invasive species control, native species planting, tree plantings, picnic table and bench restorations, there’s a lot of small things.

0:13:17.6 SM: We had a donor approach us and they wanted to do something in tribute to one of their employees. A couple hundred bucks, and we’re able to buy some boot brushes and some bee boxes for one of our parks. The boot brush is so you’re not taking in invasive species into this natural nature preserve. And then the bee box is so we can continue to help with the bee population. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it goes a long ways in helping towards the mission. There’s a lot of things that can be done, and we have different accounts for every park, so you can designate it towards your park, your favorite park, and eventually it allows us to do something in that park that is a nice little enhancement to it.

0:14:00.3 LJJ: Well, that’s awesome, Sam. Thank you so much for your updates on what’s going on in Kent County not only with our park system, but my goodness, the vision of the trails. See, you’re a visionary too, Sam.

0:14:11.1 SM: Well, it rubbed off. I got a little bit of Peter’s force. It helped rub off. Spending enough time with him, it rubbed off on me.

0:14:17.1 LJJ: That’s good. [chuckle] Hey, thank you so much, Sam, for joining us today and thank you for listening. I’d like to also thank Jake Esselink, for his wonderful production skills. If you have a topic you’d like to share, just send it our way, and we’ll be glad to have our listeners like you featured on Money, I’m home. I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson with Consumers Credit Union.

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