Downtown development highlights city's growing pains.
Ever since Santa Fe's conscious decision, nearly 100 years ago, to carefully cultivate an image as a unique historic village worth visiting, growth in the heart of the city has been as awkward and painful as puberty and just as fraught with frustration, anxiety and rebellion. And 2006 was slightly more dramatic than usual as a small group
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of high-profile projects clogged the city's pores, causing a full-on breakout of ugly urban planning pimples.
At the end of February, outgoing Mayor Larry Delgado maneuvered the giant jaws of a lurching yellow Caterpillar to take the first, ceremonial bite out of the Sweeney Center, which was demolished to make way for the new and improved Civic Center [Outtakes, March 1: "
"]. The local firm Spears Architects (with partners Fentress Bradburn of Denver) won the design competition in May 2005, but the City Council received only one bid for the construction project-a bid that was $14 million over the project's
$42 million budget. So the Council last summer risked it and rebid the project to get a better price [Outtakes, July 26: "
"]. New Mayor David Coss officiated at the official groundbreaking on Nov. 30, and construction is reportedly on schedule to be complete by the summer of 2008.
Meanwhile, the city hired a Portland firm to create a Downtown Vision Plan, which, when finally delivered, proved less than popular. Like many critics of the plan [Zane's World, Oct. 18: "
" and Nov. 8: "
"], architect Beverly Spears says the emphasis on bringing more parking lots and garages downtown is misguided. "If we warehouse too many cars downtown, it will cause total gridlock," she says.
Whether the plan will be implemented remains to be seen. City Councilor Karen Heldmeyer, who voted against hiring the Portland firm in the first place, says: "We sometimes
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pay for plans that are not any good and they deserve to sit on the shelf."
Over at the Railyard, controversy also simmered all year, especially concerning the announcement that REI would be an anchor tenant in the redevelopment. Richard Czoski, executive director of the Santa Fe Railyard Community Corporation, defends the decision to allow REI, explaining that they had leased the space to a local developer who needed to sub-lease to a national chain in order to finance the Market Station Complex. Czoski says the board of directors considered the decision seriously, but ultimately, "We felt that REI was an excellent choice because they're consumer-owned, because of what they sell and their level of involvement in the community." Not surprisingly, some nearby small business owners are furious. "Why bother writing a master plan when they're
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not going to stick with it?" Dan McCarthy, the owner of Santa Fe Mountain Sports, demands. "Sure, they're following the letter of the law, but not the
spirit
of it," he argues. McCarthy says he wishes that the city had taken the initiative, through public financing, to ensure the Railyard would have been filled with locally owned businesses. It's too late now, of course, but in retrospect, Councilor Heldmeyer says it could have been different. In hearings that resulted in approval of the development company, "The question that wasn't asked by Council and maybe should have been was, 'Can you afford to do it?'" Heldmeyer says. But, she acknowledges, "There have been, all along, compromises that the Railyard Community Corporation has had to make in order to meet what they felt was their responsibility."
