BURLINGTON — Children carried skateboards and politicians brought scissors to the waterfront Monday for a ribbon-cutting to celebrate the completion of the Waterfront Access North project.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., threatened to join them, much to his wife Marcelle Leahy’s chagrin — “she’s trained as a nurse” he joked — but alas the senior senator’s staff had booked a return flight to Washington, he said, that would cut short his plans for a session in the waterfront’s recently opened public skate park. Leahy helped state and local officials secure $4 million in federal money for the waterfront rehabilitation effort.
The skate park is one of several projects the city began in August 2014 as part of long running efforts to pull Burlington’s waterfront out of its industrial past and into a different kind of utilitarian future. Or, as Mayor Miro Weinberger put it: the city is transitioning from a “post-industrial lakeshore to a 21st century waterfront.”
That transition dates back to the 1980s when presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was the city’s mayor and Burlington acquired much of the waterfront land that is today being redeveloped and repurposed.
“We are celebrating today more than the opening of a municipal project,” Weinberger said, “We’re marking the rebirth of the northern waterfront.”
In addition to the skate park, the city also recently refurbished the “decayed” and “disjointed” waterfront bike path, Weinberger said. That work included environmental remediation, stormwater measures to capture runoff in wetlands before it enters Lake Champlain and moving power lines underground.
It cost a combined $9.1 million, drawn from more than 20 funding sources large and small, including $40,000 from Burton Snowboards for the skate park, according to city officials. Four million dollars came from the federal government and another $3.9 million from tax increment financing (TIF) — a tool that allows municipalities to put future property tax revenue into infrastructure projects, thereby encouraging private investment in development that will serve the public.
Weinberger thanked Shumlin for his support of Vermont’s TIF District program, which allows areas of a municipality — typically downtowns — to make use of the funding mechanism for voter approved projects. Without TIF money, the waterfront rehabilitation couldn’t happen, Weinberger said.
Gov. Peter Shumlin said every year there’s a debate in the Legislature about whether to end the TIF district program, and Burlington’s waterfront is an example of why he believes it is a critical program. “It’s in all of our interests to keep TIF alive and well and moving forward,” Shumlin said. He praised the “vision” of Weinberger and Burlington residents who approved the projects.
Next year the city will begin work to extend the bike path to North Beach using TIF and other funding sources.
In 2014 voters approved $9.6 million in TIF projects, much of which will go toward the planned redevelopment of the old Moran coal plant, which provided the benighted backdrop for Monday’s news conference.
Other projects include the construction of a new community sailing center and marina in the same area.
A skateboarder drops into the bowl at a newly built skate park on Burlington’s waterfront. Photo by Morgan True / VTDigger
