by Joe Sullivan
The ill-considered attempt to ramrod a $6 million public outlay for Lakeshore Gardens through City Council hopefully marks the end of a terribly flawed, piecemeal approach to making development decisions in this city.
The push for the gardens, however meritorious they may have been, epitomizes everything that's been wrong with the public decision-making process under Mayor Victor Ashe. The mayor and a handful of influential proponents privately lobbied Council members to support the $6 million without any public presentation or discussion of their plans. Nor was there any public address as to how the $6 million related to the entirety of the city's capital spending budget or the property tax consequences of same. Ditto for how maintenance of the gardens might affect the city's operating budget on an ongoing basis.
The gardens are just the most flagrant example of how projects get sprung in isolation without being evaluated in the context of any sort of comprehensive plan. Downtown redevelopment efforts, with some exceptions, continue to be marred by this same piecemeal approach, sudden changes of the pieces in response to changing pressures, and a dearth of public participation in the planning process. Indeed, Ashe has repeatedly spurned calls for the development of any sort of comprehensive plan or framework for evaluating how new undertakings fit the city's overall needs and resources.
All of this is about to change, however, with the election of a new mayor this fall. Both mayoral candidates, Madeline Rogero and Bill Haslam, are loud and clear that they will take a totally different approach to decision-making on the city's part.
More public involvement and better planning have become watchwords of the Rogero campaign. She has embraced, as a frame of reference, the comprehensive downtown plan participatively developed under the aegis of Nine Counties/One Vision by consultants Crandall Arambula. Prospective downtown developments should be considered in relation to its tenets in her view.
Haslam has called for a three-step capital budget planning process that includes:
"1) Presenting each item to City Council in a workshop session; 2) The expected return on investment for significant applicable capital budget items will be detailed, along with the impact on the city's operating budget, and an explanation of how it fits with the city's overall economic development strategy; and 3) Each significant project will be the subject of a public discussion and feedback process. Results will be reported to City Council."
The one downtown redevelopment plan that passes every test Rogero and Haslam might impose is the Kinsey Probasco plan for Market Square and its environs. Its participative approval process was masterfully directed by the chairman of Knoxville's Community Development Corp, Bill Lyons, and unanimously adopted by City Council in early 2002. (Brian Conley, the Metro Pulse publisher, is a partner in the Kinsey Probasco plan.)
In addition to a $7.3 million refurbishment of the Square's public space and its facades, the plan called for a $1.5 million extension of Krutch Park to connect the square to a $6 million cinema on Gay Street, with the historic façade of the former S&W Cafeteria serving as its entrance. The cinema is the magnet to pull people into the area and foster commercial revitalization on the square itself. Moreover, the plan called for a $9 million, 525-space garage just to the west of the square with 40 condominiums on top—important additions to downtown's residential stock.
Work on the public space is belatedly nearing completion. But both the cinema and the garage/condo complex have been caught up in a swirl of crosscurrents that often seem to keep Knoxville from finishing what it's started.
In an attempt to save money on the cinema, the city has encapsulated it into plans for a $17 million, federally funded transit center that would be co-located on the Gay Street site. However, the stringent federal design standards and approval processes for the facility are anything but swift. A mid-2006 completion date is now projected if all goes well.
In an effort to expedite the cinema, Kinsey Probasco has sought to get it "decoupled" from the transit center. But the Ashe administration has advised the firm's Jon Kinsey that the only way to do so is to relocate the cinema to another site. This comes on the heels of having just spent $1.5 million on the extension and reconfiguration of Krutch Park to connect the cinema with Market Square.
The Crandall Arambula plan calls for Gay Street to become the downtown's primary retail street. The cinema fits into that construct, but the transit center doesn't. It's understood that Crandall Arambula has recommended an alternative site for the center, spanning State Street along the block where the News Sentinel's former quarters are due to be demolished. But any consideration of this alternative may have to await a new city administration, which spells more delay for all concerned.
At the same time, pressures for additional downtown parking have prompted the city to enlarge the planned garage to 800 spaces at a cost of $14 million. That enlargement would mean the near exclusion of the residential units. Crandall Arambula favors smaller garages that fit unobtrusively into mixed-used buildings. But those will take longer to plan and build, and the parking needs are urgent. In the short run, Knox County has proposed to convert its former jail site on State Street into 283 surface parking spaces on an interim basis. Those could serve as a stopgap that would preserve Kinsey Probasco's originally approved design.
Lest this column sound too harsh on Ashe and his administration, I would also like to note that I believe the mayor in many ways has made good on his credo of making Knoxville a city that "looks right and works right." Before his term ends, I'll have a lot more to say on this account as well.
July 17, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 29
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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