Madelyn Greene acknowledged having some trepidation as she attended the open spaces meeting Thursday at Birmingham City Hall.

“When you don’t know a lot about something, you can’t really come with expectations,” the Oxmoor Valley Neighborhood president said. “Open spaces meant to me that it was going to be more areas where people could go and just kind of, I guess, (have) picnics and stuff. That’s what I like.”

Staffers from the Birmingham Department of Planning, Engineering and Permits hosted a pair of informational meetings to let residents know about Open Spaces, Parks and Recreation, chapter 5 of the city’s comprehensive plan that was announced in 2013.

“Chapter five details about our open space and parks and recreation,” project manager Jess Blankenship Mays said. “This is one of the main goals of that comp plan that we are fulfilling with designating the open space districts.”

To implement the land use policies of the comprehensive plan, the city would adopt three districts, as outlined in a proposed ordinance. Those are:

• Open Space Neighborhood and Greenway
• Open Space Regional Park
• Open Space Natural Areas

“The open space neighborhood parks and greenway really is just like your local neighborhood parks,” Mays said, citing the greenway that separates eastbound traffic from westbound traffic. “The Open Space Natural Area is just undeveloped land.”

Open Space Regional Parks are the city’s five large regional parks, including Ruffner Mountain Park, Railroad Park and Red Mountain Park.

“We’re hoping that maybe by the fall of this year that parks are sort of our larger sort of recreational areas and they would have a designated zoning district,” senior planner Donald Wilborn said. “Those zoning districts would then dictate sort of what’s allowed. For example, maybe in what we would call a regional park, we would allow a small number of retail uses, like maybe somebody wants to have a pop-up shop at Red Mountain to maybe sell items. Or maybe Railroad Park has maybe a small commercial area that they would be able to have those as permitted uses under certain conditions that would also help us sort of regulate things that maybe would go into these districts.

“If we’ve got something that’s designated as an open space, we’re saying that we’re not going to allow any type of development to go in,” Wilborn said. “It’s intended to be sort of a natural preserved space.”

Residents asked questions about the districts and appeared receptive to the proposed ordinance.

Greene, the Oxmoor Valley Neighborhood president, said she needs to see a map that details what the planning department envisions for open spaces in her area.

“But I’m loving what I’m hearing,” she said. “I’m loving what I’m hearing.”