Thursday night, Erica and I attended the public hearing for the upcoming 3CDC renovations to Washington Park. With our move to OTR, this was our first public hearing with this community, although for this particular project they're in the final stretch of planning.
This event was a real eye-opener for us and it left us a bit conflicted.
First, the project itself is impressive and 3CDC and the park board have put a lot of work into it. The overall plan is exciting and when completed it will be a real benefit to the community and its residents, and a real centerpiece in OTR. Their timeframe is aggressive to say the least, and if all goes according to plan they're looking for a completion sometime fall of 2011. It does mean the park will be closed completely at some point, but Steve Leeper committed over and over again that they would do everything they could to leave at least some part of the park open during construction for as long as possible.
The new park has a laundry list of features and attractions - a two-deck parking structure under the north section of the park, an absolutely awesome playground, a top-notch dog park, fountains, water features and state-of-the-art facilities to allow endless outdoor concerts and events.
Does it have everything everyone wanted? No, and that became a rather heated topic at the hearing. The two biggest points of contention were the lack of basketball courts and deep water pool.
Now, to put this post in context, there have been multiple hearings prior to Thursday's and I am assuming lots of community input throughout that helped build the current blueprints. This is an assumption on my part, because there was not a lot of thanks for what WAS included, only gripes about what wasn't.
In terms of the pool, this is a much wider subject than the park itself. This gets into problems with budget cuts at the recreation commission and city hall itself and the closures and cut-backs in every corner of the city. Some closures were new information as of last night and I think it's unfair to try and pin that on 3CDC. If people are angry they need to direct that at those who are actually responsible for our public pools and their closures. To their credit, 3CDC did offer to be an advocate on this topic and talk to the decision makers responsible for the pool closures in OTR.
Now, while I'm unable to put any blame on 3CDC for the pool, I think they did make a rather large mistake by not including new basketball courts in this park. They said the compromise is that the new courts at the SCPA will be open to the public when school is not in session. I find that a rather weak fix and with everything they did in this park I feel like leaving basketball courts out of this plan (courts which currently exist at the park) was a major mistake and added fuel to the fire. The basketball courts are an important part of the community and leaving them out is a mistake-- depending on the SCPA courts is tenuous at best.
It seemed like everyone had a representative at this hearing. Whether it was residents, the schools, the police, homeless advocates or any other foundation in town, someone was there. This is a big project and it will affect the entire city, and the turnout last night was evidence of that.
The ugly side of last night was how clearly divided people are on these issues, and more specifically, how divided OTR felt. There was a lot of criticism directed at 3CDC and new residents and at one point a new resident was even heckled when he stood up to speak and ask a question. He was later apologized to, but as new residents ourselves it was uncomfortable and made us wonder about our own impact in this community.
We ended up ducking out early (well, almost an hour later than it was scheduled to have ended) because things seemed to just keep stewing. Homeless advocates were going on the offensive against 3CDC and for whatever reason one guy was there railing on them about Fountain Square's parking garage and everything else they had done. There were a lot of valid questions and answers throughout the night, but they had definitely lost focus by the time we left.
In the end I think the park will play an important role in this community, in whatever form it ends up taking. It will be completed and I'm sure 3CDC will do a nice job of it. Not everyone will be happy with it, but I don't believe there's any solution that would have made everyone happy last night.
OTR is changing in drastic ways and it's doing it very quickly. There are also some very obvious divisions here, some new, some not so new. It ran the full spectrum last night. I talked to some people who were long-time residents that left us feeling good and welcomed, and then there were things said that made us feel not so good.
When it all gets boiled down, I think the issue of most concern is that long time residents are losing their community. I'm not talking about homeless advocates or the other half dozen groups who were there throwing stones last night. I'm talking about individuals and the residents of OTR. When they spoke you could tell it was genuine and that they're concerned about being pushed out and want to be part of the changes going on. OTR was an endangered neighborhood, and it still is, but perhaps for different reasons right now.
