If you took all the studies, conceptual plans and consultant recommendations about the Traverse City bay front and stacked them one on top of another, you'd have ... a lot of paper.
If the city had ever acted on any of them, we'd have a very different view of the bay today.
So here we are in 2009 with another public process under our belts (the very extensive "Your Bay, Your Say" effort), lots of input and a load of good ideas, but no money to make it happen.
It's time to do something about all that -- about seeking public input, holding scads of meetings and debating great ideas, only to do absolutely nothing.
Under a plan being touted by newly elected Mayor Chris Bzdok, the city would use up to $3 million from the Brown Bridge Trust Fund to undertake some of the key initiatives called for in the Your Bay process, such as creating new and improved restrooms, building children's play equipment (including a splash pool), making beach and trail improvements, increasing boater access, possibly creating an ice skating rink and an ampitheater and more.
Your Bay, Your Say was a successful process that drew significant public input; not following up on it would betray the time and effort expended by so many.
The biggest hurdles, in fact, don't have much to do with the actual plan. Those will be figuring a way to get people safely across (or under) Grandview Parkway, and getting voters to tap the Trust Fund to pay for it.
Right now, the trust -- from royalties on gas and oil wells located near the city-owned Brown Bridge Pond -- totals $12 million with an average of $550,000 in interest going to the General Fund every year.
According to the city charter, "... income from said Trust shall be used to supplement City taxes as a credit against the General Fund" and "the principal ... shall not be used except by a three-fifths (3/5) majority vote of the qualified electors voting thereon."
In 1994 voters agreed to use $45,000 to buy more land near Brown Bridge Pond; in 1997 voters approved a plan to spend $300,000 to buy former railroad right-of-way to help complete West End beach; in 2007 voters rejected a proposal to cap the fund -- which totaled $9.8 million at the time -- at $9 million and use additional money to pave streets.
The trust fund has risen to $12 million since then; in an op-ed last month, Bzdok said he thought $3 million would pay for all the improvements "we realistically need."
Getting a three-fifths majority of voters to tap the trust fund may be far easier, however, than finding a practical, safe way to get pedestrians across Grandview Parkway. And until that happens, all other plans are moot.
Right now, the only sure way to get from parking on the south side of the Parkway to the beaches on the north side is the pedestrian tunnel just west of where Cass Street dead-ends into the Parkway.
While the tunnel works, it has a lot of shortcomings -- it's small, relatively hard to get to, dark and, after sundown, more than a little creepy. It cannot do it all.
Building an overpass, such as the one across U.S. 31 near Traverse City State Park, has its own problems. Overpasses are inaccessible for those with mobility problems and totally out of the question for people who use wheelchairs; and they're unsafe during the winter.
That can't be a dead end, however. After years of false starts it's time for the city to resolve the Parkway problem and then make necessary changes to enhance and upgrade our beautiful bay front. With care and a pledge to first do no harm, we can make it a more useful and usable place.
As Bzdok put it in a recent op-ed, "We can do something average, or something great."
Let's choose great.
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