Rosanne Nieto, Concord resident and co-leader the Concord Naval Weapons Station Neighborhood Alliance. Photo by the Greenbelt Alliance via Flickr.
Nieto and her neighbors say they value the station site’s open space as a community asset for recreation and environmental preservation.
“We raised our hands and said ‘We don’t want you to do that,’” says Rosanne Nieto, who lives near the former weapons station.
In turn, these neighborhood activists caught the attention of local groups, including Greenbelt Alliance, a nonprofit organization that brings stakeholders together to find innovative solutions to the Bay Area’s growth challenges.
Jeremy Madsen, Executive Director of Greenbelt Alliance, says his organization advocated for the city to pursue a smarter development plan for the base. Rather than simply investing in costly sprawl, the city could transform the former Navy base into an economically beneficial and tight-knit neighborhood with plenty of open space and a denser cluster of housing options near the transit line.
Together, Greenbelt Alliance and concerned local residents helped create the Community Coalition for a Sustainable Concord, a broad alliance of housing, labor, faith-based, neighborhood and environmental organizations that asked the city to go back to the drawing board and create a plan that would work for the community, the economy and the environment.
“Collaboration was key,” Madsen says, noting that while the need to involve many groups and voices in the process obviously made the project more complicated, it also meant that the final product was truly representative of what local residents and groups wanted.
“I was thrilled with the collaboration we had with the stakeholders in the community,” said Concord Mayor Ron Leone.