Another in depth look at Rio Nuevo in todays Arizona Daily Star.
Nine years later, Downtown Tucson has two refurbished movie theaters, a re-creation of the Presidio wall and a wider freeway underpass.
Can a community redevelop a downtown? Check out the WSJ article HERE.It covers the successful revitalization of El Paso’s downtown. From WSJ;
The difference between this and earlier revitalization efforts that fizzled is the involvement of deep-pocketed investors, who decided in 2004 to gather their own resources and chart a course for revival.
Everyone realizes there must be a public private partnership to get Rio Nuevo off the ground and successful. Tucson missed the opportunity during the big boom to attract the private sector. Feet dragging, buearucratic wrangling and road blocks caused costly delays. Our downtown redevelopment is as much a case of timing as it is planning. We missed the housing boom. We couldn’t capitalize on the commercial boom because the residential base wasn’t there. Add in the red tape delays and we see developers unwillingness to re-develop or start new projects. We are left with ‘big hats and no cattle‘ or lots of talk and no action.
They key to the El Paso plan? Business leaders created the plan with MINIMAL neighborhood input.
The group brought in city officials to advise it on the plan’s feasibility, but in a move that proved controversial, the business group elected not to subject the plan to widespread public scrutiny in its early phases, reasoning that too many opposing viewpoints might stymie the process.
“El Paso is going into the 21st century with our running shoes on,” he says. “Right now, this town is poised for takeoff.”
Hey can’t Tucson get ‘poised for takeoff’ in my lifetime?
Now, a bit of opinion on Tucson’s downtown revitalizing efforts. Read the full Steve Emerine story HERE.
The city persuaded the Legislature in 1999 to approve a district containing Tucson’s downtown area and a strip along both sides of Broadway all the way to Park Place, where incremental revenues from state sales taxes would go to finance Rio Nuevo downtown revitalization.
But apparently no one under Keene or Hein really knew how to revitalize a downtown. Just as the fictional emperor feared his subjects would realize he had no clothes, city bureaucrats have feared Tucsonans would realize they were naked with no ideas of how to fix downtown.
They have rejected or ignored some proposals from private investors, invented reasons to delay others and insisted on complete control – plus city ownership if possible – for most downtown proposals.
Now, city officials are hesitating to build a new downtown arena because they aren’t sure when they can build a convention hotel to go with it.
They haven’t started the hotel because they’re not sure they can afford the arena.
The city has no strong and experienced elected leader, and it continues to show.
Couple El Paso’s capital investment in it’s downtown with an incentive program to entice employers to locate in geographic areas with higher paying jobs and you have a working program. Click HERE to learn more.
Read some great background stories on our Rio Nuevo challenges – HERE – HERE – HERE – HERE – HERE- And Foraker’s detailed analysis HERE.
With the pending wold wide financial crisis and complete shut down of funding options don’t look for any Rio Nuevo success in the near future. From the East Valley Tribune (Phoenix) projects all over the state are being put on hold. Of interesting note, the Gaylord Hotel deal to build a convection center and hotel in Mesa is being put on hold. Gaylord proposed a similar deal here in Tucson but our Rio Nuevo team cut them.
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2004 was a generation ago. We were in the middle of a housing/condo boom, cheap money and a lot of risk takers. I don’t see it happening again for Tucson for a while.
What many people do not know is that the master plan for Rio Nuevo, completed by a firm out of Annapolis called Hunter Interests and adopted by the city council in 2001, recommended that the management of the project be turned over to a private sector entity with public oversight.
The recommendation was developed in a technical memorandum (#19 in a series of 28 technical memoranda on various topics related to the master plan), but it was never released to the public because it was too “controversial”. Translation: the city manager Luis Gutierrez didn’t want to give up control of the project, and neither did his buddies on the council, so they swept Tech Memo 19 under the rug.
The Rio Nuevo office used to publish the Tech Memos on the Rio Nuevo website, and #19 was always missing, with the explanation that it had been “removed”. It was rather Kremlin-esque.
You can read the Rio Nuevo Master Plan for yourself at the Rio Nuevo website, without the technical memoranda, but as you can see from this excerpt from the master plan, it was referenced in the main body of the master plan.
Here’s the URL for the Rio Nuevo site, and then the excerpt from the master plan’s executive summary, pertaining to the “Rio Nuevo Development Corporation”.
http://www.tucsonaz.gov/pdf/executivesummary.pdf
“• After considering a number of organizational options, the planning team recommends that the City of Tucson establish a new, single-purpose development corporation that would be charged with the primary implementation responsibility for the Rio Nuevo Master Plan. The Rio Nuevo Development Corporation (RNDC) would be incorporated under the non-profit laws of the State of Arizona, and would seek IRS certification as a 501(c)3 corporation. The board of directors would be appointed by the Mayor and City Council and the Rio Nuevo Multipurpose Facilities District Board,
and would be drawn from Tucson business/community leaders. Governmental representatives could be on the board, as well as representatives of the Rio Nuevo Multipurpose Facilities District, and other prominent involved organizations. The board members would be business/community leaders who would contribute their time and experience as a civic contribution to their City.”
One can persuasively argue that the failure of the Rio Nuevo project can be laid on the doorstep of those city officials who deliberately and quite willfully ignored the recommendation of Tech Memo 19.
It reminds me of that old .38 Special song: “Hold on loosely . . . if you cling too tightly, you’re gonna lose control.”
In 2006, a private sector group spun out of the Tucson Downtown Alliance and the Friends of Downtown (Don Martin’s committee), called the “Downtown Stakeholders” proposed the development of a private-sector master plan for downtown, and began to put such a plan together. This was threatening to certain city council members and the city manager, so they had to do away with the Tucson Downtown Alliance and Downtown Stakeholders and create yet another group called the Downtown Tucson Partnership to do the city’s bidding. In 2007, those groups went away to make room for the Partnership, and any talk of a private-sector master plan has gone the way of the Alliance, the Stakeholders, the Rio Nuevo Citizens Advisory Committee, and the Rio Nuevo District Board.
It’s easy to pick on neighborhoods and applaud El Paso for skipping the step of getting neighborhood buy-in. Tucson certainly screwed up at the beginning of Rio Nuevo by giving Menlo Park neighborhood an effective veto power over any project west of the freeway.
Tucson’s problem with regard to downtown since then has not been that its process has been too open and inclusive. There was a decent vision that was created that balanced cultural attractions that some Tucson special interest groups wanted, with some commercial projects that the economic consultants knew had to be the catalysts and the drivers of the project. That vision had the buy-in of the community, and compared to the way the City runs it today, there was WAY more disclosure and transparency.
The last three years in particular have been marked by secrecy and no accountability.
I would argue that one of the reasons the arena hasn’t been built is that there is no consensus in the community for what the arena needs to accomplish: how large, for what uses, what users, etc. The Steve Emerine commentary gets to that. Is the arena there to support the hotel and convention center or the other way around? Is it for concerts (with minor-league hockey supporting that) or for minor-league sports, with concerts being a secondary benefit? Where is the dog and where is the tail?
What if we just built an outdoor stadium there, that could be used for spring training and other baseball, and also for professional and youth soccer, and could be used also for concerts? It would be cheaper than an arena, and could help solve our soccer facility problem and our baseball problem.
Good leadership takes the best from both technical and business-oriented expertise AND grassroots input and develops a plan that is feasible and publicly supported, builds the consensus and political will to proceed, and then does so. Tucson’s city government has gotten a lot of good advice, and it has paid dearly for it. But there has never been any follow-through, except for projects that were envisioned and spearheaded by others (the Fox and Rialto Theatres).