from a nearby subdivision is being designed, another neighborhood-scale green anchor. Upgrades at Veterans Park include bathrooms, a fishing pier, and walking trail. City staff are also demanding more and better open space in private developments: pools where appropriate, playgrounds and fields for children, and passive green belts that give neighborhoods breathing room. These big civic moves have been accelerated by organizational decisions that sound small but matter. When City Center, the fire station, and police facility projects lingered as wish-list items, Daugherty—then and the city continues to work through the GNRC regional transportation process to advance corridor upgrades. Highway 100 remains a state-managed facility, which complicates widening timelines, but Fairview has adopted a practical interim strategy: require developers along the corridor to install turn lanes as they build, slowly unlocking throughput and safety improvements one frontage at a time. A separate thread of work is about first impressions. Exit 182 at I-40—the gateway many visitors see—is “dark and gloomy,” Carroll says, especially compared to the vibrant streets just a few miles south. The city pursued and won a grant to install interchange lighting, the first step in a broader effort to clean up the corridor and reposition it for hotels, restaurants, and services that suit a highway gateway. Taken together with a grant to “light up” the Highway 96/I-40 interchange, and a long-term push to open the I-840 corridor on the west side, Fairview is visibly widening its development map. There is land—not cheap, but strategically located—and the city’s centrality is a selling point in every pitch. “We’re thirty minutes from everywhere,” Carroll says. “Downtown Nashville, Dickson, Franklin—we’re at the crossroads of I-40, I-840, Highway 96, and Highway 100. If you want a job close to home, our goal is to have it here for you.” If the economic narrative is compelling, the green narrative is beloved. Fairview’s 700-acre Nature Park, protected by a conservation easement, sits in the heart of town and anchors the city’s identity as much as any civic building. It hosts festivals, concerts, and day camps, and its programming team constantly finds new ways to engage families in the outdoors. The park is untouchable in the best sense: shielded for future generations, even as the city grows around it. A complementary Historic Village project is advancing on the planning table, with grants in play for a farmers market, amphitheater, bathrooms, and a loop walking trail.The venue is being designed to comfortably host 300 patrons, giving Fairview a flexible new stage for arts, education, and community life. Elsewhere, a new nine-acre park—dedicated land 109 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 06, ISSUE 12 FAIRVIEW, TN
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