By Roger Gitlin – EYE ON DEL NORTE – December 22, 2021
Why the City will upfront $170,000 to win a Grant that will complete Front and K St projects.
At the Tuesday evening Crescent City Council meeting, Councilors voted unanimously to contract with Stover Engineering to design and engineer two projects, one on iconic Front St, the other on K St to make both “shovel-ready.
“I asked myself why would the City spend this kind of $ BEFORE actually winning the Grant.
Due to some ZOOM issues, I was not able to ask my question to the Council or City Manager Eric Wier.
The answer became clear to me but perhaps not others after speaking with the City Manager. The Grant process has become increasingly competitive. In the next 18 months $1 trillion+ will trickle down from our Federal and State partners in infrastructure funding.
Crescent City MUST be prepared and it MUST present grant applications that surpass the competition.I completely and unequivocally support the completion of Front St and Beachfront Park projects.
These projections are transformational.
My plea to the City Manager and the Council is to articulate and SHARE your vision, spell it out loudly and often so we public understand money (sometimes unreimbursable) must be allocated to win these transformational grants.
I do not believe the Council or the City Manager have underscored the importance of justifying these allocations. Sometimes our elected operate inside a bubble and forget who they serve: The Public.
Stover Engineering should finish these projects/contracts by July 1, 2022 where it is my most passionate hope the City will be shovel-ready and prepared to justify these rather humbling investments in transforming our community into something much more than mediocre.
Unfortunately Roger, I disagree with you on several fronts. There are several problems with the current version of Front Street as it has been formed in its “new” format. First of all in its new configuration, the complexity of the layout makes for far greater maintenance problems in the future at a cost that the City is unlikely to be able to afford. It always looks great initially then as you know mother nature and the public’s use tends to make it look old and used up in a short while . What happens then is as it deteriorates, the City will be unable to do normal maintenance until it looks terrible for decades. The same thing will happen in Beach Front Park, particularly if the Council has its way with all the frills and bobbles outlined in the master plan. We have already had that experience with the pool and Kidtown. Simple, no frills, but durable design is the only thing that works around here if you are depending on the City’s government to maintain it, or at least attempt to do so. The current plans ought to be scrapped for something that at least has a chance of being some what presentable for twenty five to thirty years with little degradation. Neither the park Master Plan nor the Front Street changes have any hope of being maintained in a reasonable fashion. The other issue most folks have is with the current version of Front Street, very few like it. I suppose when you are used to a broad, yet simple entrance to the City, the convoluted mess that the last few blocks have become is not very pleasing to the eye. I suppose it provides additional parking for SeaQuake, but that shouldn’t have been the intent. I know a lot of money has been spent and is in the wings so to speak, but this is not the way for the city to become transformational. The park and Front Street as planned will become a burden in the short future just like every other palace or castle the County and City have attempted. When you say the people should have a say in this future train wreck, I hope you meant it. Crescent City is but a town of 9,000 people or there about and can not afford to have another Grand Gesture. That is what Front Street and Beach Front Park represent. This is not some major metropolitan city in Southern California, and therefore; we must build simple, durable, and smart with the money we are to receive. Only then will we have something presentable and relatively maintenance free for some time to come. Excessive does not equate to transformational.