Shawn Vestal: Pavilion plans should have let in more sunshine

Confession: When I voted in favor of sprucing up Riverfront Park, the question of whether to cover the Pavilion didn’t have a thing to do with it.

I think I prefer it uncovered, in fact. I found the alternatives presented this week at the City Council to be awfully cool, and I’m persuaded that covering the pavilion might be a money pit.

I’m no “cover-the-Pavilion” doctrinaire, in other words.

But there had to be a better way not to cover the Pavilion – one with more public discussion.

Now Mayor David Condon and Council President Ben Stuckart are suggesting that the Park Board should be brought under the control of the City Council. Such a change would require a public vote to change the city charter, which Stuckart said he’s planning to put forward.

“It’ll be brought to the voters,” he said. “I believe there needs to be some accountability built in to the people who are elected by citizens.”

Under the city charter, parks funding is locked in at 8 percent of the budget and the appointed park board is independent of the City Council, in an attempt to protect parks from political interference or budget raids. The notion of eliminating that independence – while perhaps appealing in terms of accountability – will surely raise concerns in a town that prizes parks as much as ours does.

But the cover debate has excited some passions. After a long public process led to broad support from voters to spend nearly $65 million on the park, what’s happened in recent weeks has seemed frustratingly opaque and unaccountable to many, including some of the plan’s most ardent supporters.

The Park Board seems poised to vote Thursday to approve preliminary designs for a netted Pavilion structure design. Proponents of the park renovation had pitched a covered Pavilion prior to the vote, and some of them began raising hell when they learned of the proposed change a month ago.

“If we’re going to veer away from what we promised the voters, we have to be able to justify it,” said Mike Allen, a former City Council and Park Board member who was involved in the project planning from the get-go. “We can’t just make these decisions in conference rooms.”

Condon and Stuckart both pitched the park bond project to the public before the vote with specific references to covering the Pavilion. On Wednesday, both expressed concerns about backing away from that idea.

Both also emphasized that while there is disagreement over this part of the plan, it’s part of a larger project that will dramatically improve the city’s flagship park. “The overall Riverfront Park investment is going well, and I don’t want to lose sight of that,” Stuckart said.

Condon said there were three goals with the Pavilion that emerged from project planning: make it a central “beacon” in the park, provide some level of shelter, and reconnect to the river. He thinks the designers “hit it out of the park” with regard to river views, and made a nod toward the beacon with proposals to use light and reflective panels in the netting. But he hopes and expects to see further options developed to provide more areas of shade and cover within the design.

Supporters of a complete “resheathing” of the netted Pavilion cover said they expected designers and park officials to make a side-by-side case to the City Council on Monday night. Like, a covered alternative versus a non-covered one. But they did no such thing. They presented the aforementioned designs, showing a netted cover with reflector panels and a variety of lighting options, elevated platforms for viewing, office and vendor space with landscaped roofing, and terraced seating with an expansive view of the river.

As far as covered options, designers and parks officials said it would be expensive to even begin considering them, saying it would cost a half-million dollars and take more than a year just to study the feasibility of a cover – with a decent chance of unexpected costs at the end of that. The total Pavilion budget is $19.6 million.

“Once you see the ideas here, you’re going to forget all about a cover,” Park Board President Chris Wright told the City Council.

Allen has not forgotten the cover. He’s convinced that a covered, multi-use space is crucial to creating year-round attractions at the Pavilion. And he’s incensed about the blithe and secretive manner that the idea has been abandoned.

“The idea with the Pavilion was to create a visual and physical center that serves as the lantern and the gathering place for the community,” Allen said this week. “We’ve taken this really big idea and we’re making it smaller and smaller and smaller.”

As Park Board members began delving into the Pavilion project earlier this year, it started to become clear that covering the netted structure might not be so simple, said Ted McGregor, the owner of The Inlander and a Park Board member who oversaw the advisory committee that developed the park plan.

The ability of the structure to support a cover that would likely weigh tons needed to be investigated, an expensive proposition in and of itself. Experts suggested it was likely that more support work would eventually be needed. In terms of aesthetics, “every designer we’ve had,” he said, gave the board the same message: “Don’t cover it.”

By the time the board met June 5, a consensus had arisen among those involved in the project planning to forgo covering the Pavilion. This came as news to those who support a cover.

The board put a vote on hold to hear more from the community, McGregor said. That included Monday’s presentation to the council, as well as a public hearing Tuesday night.

“I don’t feel like we’re trying to hide anything. I don’t feel like we’re trying to slip it through,” he said. “Last month, we could have taken a vote but we said we need to learn more, we need to hear more.”

I don’t agree with every bit of Allen’s assessment of the Pavilion plan – but I think he’s right about the process. And I’m not sure how much of the Park Board’s independence we want to trade away for accountability – but it seems like a question worth asking.

That Pavilion structure is a defining feature of the city, and perhaps the defining feature of the park. In deciding its future, there should have been more sunshine.