Once again, the Tuscaloosa City Council shows astounding shortsightedness toward the Black Warrior riverfront. A decade ago, just after completing a plan for a riverfront park, the city encouraged private developers to buy land in the middle of the city’s planned park, even though the city had a right of first refusal on the property. As a result, for the past 8 years the city’s Riverwalk park is two unconnected stretches of multi-use path with a mile and a half long gap in the middle rather than one continuous park that the city had planned. On top of that, the developers have been tied up for years trying to get a series of overly ambitious plans approved. They got final approval 6 months ago for a plan that paves nearly the entire site, but have yet to break ground, 8 years after buying th property. One major problem with this riverfront project is that it it inappropriate for such a small location.
And now the city seems eager to repeat these mistakes. Rather than cooperating with the Army Corps of Engineers to “to determine the feasibility for the city’s future river projects,” taking “into account Federal Emergency Management Agency standards,” the city has decided that “the study would be a waste of money since no concrete project plans have been set.”
When the riverwalk condos were first proposed, they couldn’t get federal approval because too much of the site was within the 100-year flood zone. The developers spent a great deal of money resurveying and convincing federal officials to revise the flood map. Nearly a decade later, the project hasn’t broken ground, and the developers have spent over a million dollars. City employees have spent countless hours evaluating plans and meeting with developers about project proposals.
Maybe, just maybe, we would be better off if we studied the riverfront to see what kinds of project would be appropriate for the existing conditions rather than deciding what development we want to build and then fudging the data to shoehorn it in? After all planning first and studying later has worked really well for Riverwalk Place so far, right?
To our elected officials, however, gathering data about the condition of the river before planning what to build would be an obvious waste of time: “The data we would get out of this would be worthless,” Mayor Walt Maddox added. “It would be money down the drain.” Not like the money spent so far on Riverwalk Place.
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