[B]URLINGTON — A citizens group wants the city of Burlington to scrap plans to renovate City Hall Park, and has acquired enough signatures to mandate a city council vote on whether to put an advisory question about the park on the March Town Meeting Day ballot.
Keep the Park Green is unhappy with the city’s plans to increase the amount of pavement in the park and cut down full grown trees. Mayor Miro Weinberger and the plan’s supporters say the new park will be more accessible and will include nearly the same number of trees, new shrubs and grasses.
The group held a press conference last week to announce it had collected more than 3,000 signatures, well over the 1,998 needed to mandate the city council vote, according to Monique Fordham, one of the leaders of Keep the Park Green.
“We’re confident we can get a better plan, one that doesn’t reward suspicious practices or turn City Hall Park into a hot paved plaza that thousands don’t want,” Fordham said.
The city is planning to start construction this spring, Weinberger said.
Weinberger said putting the question on the ballot will delay the project by six to eight weeks and stretch the construction process into next year. If the city moves forward with its current plan, the renovated park is expected to open in December.
It’s unclear whether the council will decide to put the question on the ballot. The topic is expected to be on the agenda for the council’s Jan. 28 meeting. The vote on Town Meeting Day would be advisory and non-binding.
Weinberger said the city charter provides significant room for public input in decision making, including advisory questions that help the city shape policy. But he said the park project was so far along in the planning process, adding an advisory question would set a bad precedent.
“If we were to do this, it sends the message to city staff, our various partners, donors and grantmaking organization like the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) that no decision of the city council is really final,” he said. “I think that would be a terrible precedent to set that would cause enduring problems for the city of Burlington.”
Park renovation to cost $4 million
Weinberger said the city was using a competitive bid process and estimated the total price tag on the project to be about $4 million.
The city has already raised more than $1 million in philanthropic gifts that will go to the project, Weinberger said. About $1.2 million will come from the institutional bond, by which the University of Vermont and Champlain College pay the city for services it provides.
Another $1.2 million will come from property taxes, and about $500,000 in downtown tax increment financing will be used for stormwater work in the park.
Weinberger says it’s a good deal for taxpayers who are only on the hook for 30 percent of the cost.
Fordham counters that voters didn’t have a chance to weigh in on the funding plan for the park renovation.
“None of those pots of money that are coming from taxpayers were ever voted on,” she said. “They never went to the taxpayers and said, do you want to pay for this plan?”
Contentions about park plan
The proposed ballot question says the new park renovation will remove about 40 percent of the park’s trees and increase paved areas to cover around one-third of the park.
While 20 trees would be cut as part of the renovation project, the city plans to plant 18 new trees, Weinberger said, bringing the total number of trees in the park to between 47 and 49. There are currently 51 in the park.
The park will be better off in the long run, Weinberger said, because removing some of the fully grown trees will diversify the age range of the woodland. Trees grow faster than people think, he said.
“Will people notice that there will be some change, initially? Yes,” Weinberger said. “But they are more so going to notice how much better the park is in a variety of other ways.”
The renovations will include better lighting in the park, replacement of the fountain, and more accessible sidewalks for people with disabilities, Weinberger said.
Keep the Park Green opposes the “aesthetic and unnecessary” expensive design changes, Fordham said.
“So many people love this park, so many people told us they wanted to have a mature tree canopy, they didn’t want the mature trees cut down and replaced with saplings,” she said.
The city says that 32.5 percent of the renovated park will be “impervious surfaces.” Currently, 43 percent of the park “effectively functions as though … it were covered with hard surface,” because 25.2 percent is hardscape and 18.6 percent is compacted soils, Weinberger said in a statement.
Fordham said the soil had become compacted because the city had not taken proper care of the park, and that the city was using its own neglect of the park to promote its plan.
Weinberger said it was the design of the park, not the city’s lack of effort, that has led to the park’s current poor condition.
“The appearance of the park is not about the effort we put in to upkeep it, it’s about the current design, the lack of irrigation and the way the park is currently used,” he said.
Weinberger said the improvements would make the park “vastly” more accessible, especially by improving the condition and grade of the paths.
Donna Walters, another leader of Keep the Park Green, said the mayor’s claims about improving ADA accessibility are “greatly inflated” as the plan would only add one more additional ADA accessible path to the three the park already has.
The group also pushed back on the city arborist’s findings that more than half of the trees in the park are in poor condition or struggling. Keep the Park Green hired an independent arborist who found only seven of the trees were in poor condition, the group said, compared with 17 the city arborist found were in poor condition.
Poor repair
The city council’s June 2018 vote to move forward with the plan came after an extensive public process, Weinberger said, which included forming an ad hoc committee that included members of Keep the Park Green.
Walters said the ad hoc committee voted down all three of the proposals the group presented, and members did not feel like they had reached any sort of compromise.
The process to re-imagine the park started when Burlington City Arts received a grant from the NEA to study the park in 2011.
“This is a beloved space, but a space that had suffered from neglect over time and was not getting the use throughout the year that it should as a central public space,” Weinberger said. “That really launched an effort to re-conceive the park, redesign it and make important improvements.”
But Fordham and Keep the Park Green say the city allowed the park to slip into poor repair in order to pitch the renovation plan they wanted.
“This park has been terribly neglected during the time this plan is being developed,” she said. “The mayor and the BCA talk about this neglect as if it wasn’t the result of inaction by the city, because of course it was, they’re the ones who are responsible for it.”
What’s Next?
The ballot question proposed by Keep the Park Green asks voters if they think the the city council and mayor should cancel the current plan and “instead, repair, maintain and improve the Park by preserving more existing trees and shaded areas, repairing grass and existing walkways, increasing lighting and benches, and retaining the historic character of the Park?”
The group received notification from the city Thursday that it had met the signature threshold.
Walters said the group wants city council to put the question they drafted, and received signatures for, on the ballot.
“There’s no form of democracy and a robust public process greater than voting, and we the people want to vote on this issue,” Walters said.
Weinberger said the question on the petition was misleading and called for the city council to move forward with the current plan.
KTPG says it vetted the language on the petition with city attorney Eileen Blackwood before circulating the petition. Weinberger said the city attorney often meets with petitioning groups to review the legality of questions but that does not represent support for the question from the city attorney or the administration.
