With spring warmth and extra hours of daylight, Salt Lake leaders' hearts are turning to their city parks — adding a new one, improving several and spending $60,000 to figure out how to fix another.
The latest addition to Salt Lake City's 640 acres of developed parkland will be small, just four acres on Library Square. But it took a long struggle before that patch of open space was approved by the City Council last week. Mayor Rocky Anderson pitched the idea hard in the past two years, to be rewarded with approval of $1.7 million for the first phase of park construction.
"But we still don't know how the whole project" — totaling $5.5 million — "will be funded, nor do we know how to pay for its upkeep," said council chairman Dave Buhler. The council asked Anderson's staff to provide specifics on funding sources by June, when it will embark on the fiscal 2003 budget.
Not much time passed before the mayor asked the council to allocate another piece of park funding: $25,000 for a Pioneer Park revitalization plan. They did so, after some hand-wringing and discussion, much of it with an elephant in the room.
"The people who live near Pioneer Park or work near Pioneer Park don't always use the park," observed Councilman Eric Jergensen. Other members agreed, though they didn't go into why the park at 300 S. 300 West attracts few families and Frisbee-throwers.
Later, Buhler called the elephant by name. "As long as you've got a great big homeless shelter" nearby, "there are going to be homeless people at Pioneer Park," he said. "It's better than it was . . . but it used to be an outdoor pharmacy."
Matt Minkevitch, director of The Road Home, said the 475-bed shelter three blocks from the park has become a bit of a blame repository. "About 100 of those (shelter residents) are children," he said. "And about half (of the adults) leave in the morning to go to work every day. It is safe to presume that a handful go to Pioneer Park. But I do want to point out that when the park has had problems with drug dealing, there were those who had the misguided perception that those dealers were staying at the shelter." They were not, Minkevitch said. "Those are predators" who prey on shelter residents.
Pioneer Park's atmosphere changes drastically on summer Saturdays when the farmers market arrives, bringing with it thousands of people hungry for fresh produce and the chance to mingle. The mayor wants to expand on that and jazz up the park, perhaps with an ice rink and Olympics-inspired public art. But all that will be discussed much later, said Rick Graham, the city's director of Public Services. "The revitalization of Pioneer Park must include the community," he said. The city will hire a consultant to develop a "final document that will give us direction" after holding public meetings.
The $60,000 approved by the council — $25,000 from the city plus $35,000 from a grant — "is all going to be spent on analysis and planning," Graham added, "not on construction."
Such a sum just for a plan? Yes, said Graham. The council voted 6-1, with only Nancy Saxton dissenting, to spend it. And next week, council members may finalize spending of another $500,000 for other park projects across the city. The most expensive is the mayor's Fairmont Skate Park proposal, which would allocate $330,000 in federal Community Development Block Grant money to design and build a skateboard park where the old Fairmont swimming pool was (near 900 East and 2300 South).
"If the council ratifies the CDBG, the skate park could be designed this fall and built next spring," said Public Services spokeswoman Nikki Bown. The Fairmont Skate Park would be the second in the city; the west-side Jordan Skate Park, which cost $240,000 to build, will open this month at 1060 S. 900 West.
"Our hope, over time, is to locate a skate park in every quadrant of the city," Graham told the council. The response was positive: "We need more of those. I wouldn't mind one closer to my house," said Buhler.
"I think we have a moral obligation to the youth," added Councilman Carlton Christensen.
The Fairmont Skate Park "gives us the south anchor we need for our city," Graham added.
A park as an "anchor" sounds like an Anderson idea. The mayor has been criticized for paying too little attention to business development in his city, and he has focused largely on other ideals: environmental preservation, "gathering places" such as Library Square. It seems Anderson wants parks, not commercial developments, to be the jewels in his crown.
But parks cost the city money — $974,000 for restoration of Memory Grove, $361,000 for the city's portion of the new Rotary Club-sponsored playground at Liberty Park, for example — while shopping centers generate sales-tax revenue to pour into the general fund. So no matter how much the mayor and council enjoy urban refuges and festival spaces, they have plentiful budgetary wrangling ahead. Once the Pioneer Park plan is written, for example, the city will have to find the money to implement it.
E-mail: durbani@desnews.com