Renovation of rundown Finlay Park remains in question

Columbia City Council will take yet another look Tuesday at ways to rebuild crumbling Finlay Park, but for less than its projected $21 million.

The public agenda gives taxpayers no clue about options to scale back the high-dollar design presented earlier this year.

City parks and recreation officials have met in recent months with consultants, led by Stantec, the firm that is the primary consultant. It was unclear Monday whether they will offer council design suggestions with price tags.

Citywide Councilman Howard Duvall said Monday he does not know whether staff will propose rebuilding the park in phases or cut back the design plan to make it more affordable.

Citywide Councilwoman Tameika Isaac Devine said she supports spending somewhere in the neighborhood of $12 million to $14 million. She also has supported a bond loan financed by meal-tax revenue, an idea that appears to have fallen out of favor with the current council.

“There’s nobody else that’s going to build Finlay Park for us,” Devine said Monday, adding that she is “embarrassed” by the way the park looks.

She favors council giving the downtown park greater priority when it comes to deciding where to spend public money. Some organizations that receive public funds, including meal tax revenue, have other ways of raising money, Devine said, declining to identify any.

Duvall said he does not expect council to vote Tuesday on Finlay Park.

Mayor Steve Benjamin has floated the idea of creating a small tax increment financing district to capture property taxes that would pay for rebuilding the park, which has become a gathering place for the homeless. Council has not discussed that plan.

Neither Benjamin nor city parks officials have been willing to say what the new cost might be to revitalize a park that for decades was described as downtown’s jewel. But in the past 10 years, the 18-acre park has fallen into serious, and in some cases unsafe, disrepair.

The Cadillac plan includes:

▪  A three-story circular building with a glass lookout from which visitors could gaze over the park.

▪  A tiered series of waterfalls that would cascade from the signature water fountain that has become a city landmark.

▪  A series of walking and biking trails.

▪  A bridge across the existing pond.

▪  A destination playground.

▪  A new entrance way along Taylor Street that could feature the popular Busted Plug sculpture.

Allison Baker, the city’s senior assistant city manger who oversees parks and recreation, has said the renovations might have to be done in phases.

“The price tag is more than we can do now,” Baker said in June of the $20 million to $22 million proposal. “There are amenities that might have to come out of the first phase and then be put back in a second phase.”

Among the key elements of the Cadillac plan the parks department would like to keep are a destination playground, a pedestrian bridge over the pond, sight lines cleared of brush to improve safety and a repositioned music pavilion so the sound is directed away from the Arsenal Hill neighborhood at the top of the park, city parks planner Todd Martin said earlier this summer. They also would like to make the park more handicap-accessible and offer more interactive public art.

Replacement of basics such as water lines, electric pumps and the eroding topography are likely to come first, along with fixing the leaky fish pond and the unused 27-foot fountain, Martin said in June.

The $1 million fountain has not worked since October. In 2014, the city repaired pumps that push 2,400 gallons per minute through the fountain. The fix did not hold.

This story was originally published August 15, 2016 at 3:12 PM with the headline "Renovation of rundown Finlay Park remains in question."