A public brainstorming session today launches yet another community effort to determine the future of Duluth's prized Bayfront Festival Park property.
This time can be different -- demands to be different.
For more than a decade, Duluthians, City Hall bureaucrats and elected leaders have been debating and spending money and studying and then not deciding anything at all about how best to use and develop the prime piece of waterfront real estate. Grassroots groups formed and planning marathons, open houses, and other ideas-generating sessions were scheduled and held.
In 2002, a master plan was even written for Bayfront, including the 25 undeveloped acres owned by the Duluth Economic Development Authority to the west of Bayfront's stage. Also west of the stage is the LaFarge cement terminal property, now vacant and for sale.
But no plan has ever been implemented. And the scrubby, brushy land adjacent to the festival park remains idle, its potential for recreation and tax revenue frustratingly untapped.
ADVERTISEMENT
To say the time has come for that to change -- for Bayfront to finally be finished -- would be an understatement on the level of suggesting Marcia Hales puts up a few Christmas lights every year. Taxpayers are tapped and the city is in a seemingly never-ending budget crisis. A vibrant, fully developed and tastefully completed Bayfront Festival Park could be a long-overdue and welcomed boon.
And there are reasons to be optimistic the planning this time can be different, that it can lead to actual implementation.
Today's meeting at 6:30 p.m. in the Great Hall at the Depot is being led by the city's planning division, which has adopted an aggressive schedule, for one thing. Its Bayfront District Small Area Plan is to be delivered to the Duluth Planning and Zoning Commission by early February with City Council consideration as soon as later that month or early March. And the plan is to include recommendations for rezoning that would set aside appropriate places for play and property necessary for industry and for the preservation of Duluth's working waterfront.
Also, developers, including Alessandro Giuliani, known for the rebirth going on at the old Clyde Iron site in Lincoln Park/West End, are clamoring to be involved this time.
And the city isn't working alone this go around. With a $60,000 federal grant through the Minnesota Lake Superior Coastal Resource Management Program, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources is pulling together all public input and planning documents ever compiled on Bayfront. The DNR has its eye on creating a boat launch; docking facilities for pleasure boats, something Duluth now lacks; and diver inspections of the two now-unused concrete slips west of the Bayfront stage. The slips could become home to visiting cruise ships, tall ships and other attractions -- a more appropriate location than behind the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center.
New public activities at Bayfront could spark needed private investment. All to the benefit of Duluth's tourism industry and taxpayers more than open to expanding the city's tax base.
As wonderful as it is, the Bayfront area could be more and mean more. With planning to make sure that what's developed -- and not developed -- jibes with the values and wishes of the entire community. And, this time, with follow through to assure the adoption and implementation of a true community plan.
