Local Nashville residents and bloggers want to know why Mayor Dean is dragging his feet on all the planning that has gone into a riverfront redevelopment plan.

Liberadio(!)

Consultants are paid a lot of money - in the case of this riverfront redevelopment plan, upwards of $450,000 - to come up with innovative ideas on improving vastly underutilized and/or contaminated public lands. Hargreaves Associates, the company hired to develop Nashville’s riverfront redevelopment project, was charged with the task of establishing a plan that included a well-thought out sequencing of projects. A project sequence cannot solely be based on what a city might want to build first. Instead, it must take into consideration other specifics like cost and environmental impact. And when changes to a plan are considered, a consultant is usually the first person called to reevaluate the sequence, keeping in mind both the environmental impact and the potential for an increase in expense.

So it is surprising that, according to Councilman Jameson, Hargreaves’ Gavin McMillan, the lead project designer, has still not heard from anyone in the Mayor’s office or MDHA with a request to go back and look at the re-sequenced projects in either “Plan B” or “Plan C Disguised as Plan B,” to re-evaluate both the cost and the environmental impact. Contacting your consultant to reevaluate would seem particularly prudent if you are concerned with a budget and costs spiraling out during the construction process.

Jonathan Belcher:

Now, after several years and half a million dollars of studying the correct way forward on redeveloping our riverfront, Mayor Dean wants to stop and study the redevelopment process some more. And make changes (hopefully this isn’t just political bickering). Again, we as a city are likely to give the benefit of the doubt as the economy IS in shambles and this is supposedly the reason that a change in course is needed on the riverfront development.

It’s time for Nashville to realize some of the potential that its planning and studying and proposing suggests that it has. The original riverfront development project was an organized, well-thought-out step in that direction. More importantly it was a project that was made with citizen input and support. It is, or at least at some point was, a funded project that was ready to begin. So here’s a thought–why not find a way to go with the plan that has already been decided on. Let’s take a step out into the real world and see what one of these proposed plans actually looks like when shovel meets ground.

Enclave:

Karl Dean did not have to be very bold with the Riverfront plan. Most of the bold work has already been done. Few could have blamed him if flaws emerged as concept became architecture. All he had to do was follow through as planned.

However, with his recent shifts we have to consider the distinct possibility that he has his own designs on the Riverfront and that he is using constituents’ short memories about what happened two years ago and their caution with moving too quickly on major developments for more cynical purposes.

If he is not being a political tactician with the Riverfront plan, then the only other judgment left to us seems to be that he is simply inept at follow through along a publicly mandated time line. Whether inept or imperious, the Dean administration is showing a penchant for less-than-effective governance, even with a mandate earned by someone else.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Development, Economy, Environment, Ideas, Neighborhoods, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.