A Times Editorial

Take time to listen, Safety Harbor

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 2, 2000

Residents are wary about a city plan to pave over more of the publicly owned downtown waterfront.

They complain that city commissioners haven't studied the plan enough. They say the plan is overblown, that it doesn't show enough appreciation for nature.

They contend that residents have been cut out of the planning process and that the whole project is being rushed.

No, we aren't talking about Clearwater. This time, it's Safety Harbor.

However, the similarities will not be lost on Safety Harbor city commissioners if they are wise.

Some Safety Harbor residents are unhappy with a plan to add more amenities to Marina Park, a small city park and marina on Old Tampa Bay just south of the Safety Harbor Resort & Spa. It is the city's most visible waterfront property.

A Tampa design firm, Wade Trim, has almost finished with the plans for additions there, which include a 25-foot-high observation tower overlooking the bay, a 30-foot-wide fountain surrounded by a wide plaza made of colored concrete, renovations to the existing pier, a clock tower, a veterans memorial and new picnic shelters, benches, lights and landscaping.

Total cost: $812,000.

Wade Trim already has interviewed sculptors and hired one to create the fountain's 14-foot-tall center sculpture of five egrets roosting on a tree snag.

Some people have been blunt about what they think of this plan: They hate it. Furthermore, they accuse the Safety Harbor City Commission of concocting the plan without enough public input and then improperly hiring Wade Trim without bids to draw up the plans.

Whether the public had enough opportunity to participate in planning for such an important city project is an open question. The City Commission has discussed various improvements to its public waterfront for a couple of years, but usually at regularly scheduled commission meetings, rather than in special meetings announced just for that purpose.

Last year, the City Commission appointed a Beautification Task Force to begin working out the details of park improvements, but the membership of that task force was not open to the general public. Instead, the task force was made up of representatives from the City Commission, Planning and Zoning Board, Parks and Recreation Advisory Board, Environmental Advisory Committee and the Public Art Committee. The meetings were announced, but few residents attended.

The City Commission didn't like some of the task force's recommendations, so the plans were redrawn.

It wasn't until the July 17 City Commission meeting, when Wade Trim gave an update and said that plans were 90 percent complete, that the public seemed to catch up.

Some city commissioners are cranky that the public is objecting now when plans are almost finished. They could forge ahead and approve the plans and let the work crews move in. Or they could borrow a page from Clearwater officials' Book of Lessons Learned.

Clearwater forged ahead to build an expensive roundabout and fountain on Clearwater Beach that the public didn't like and said was ill-conceived. City Manager Mike Roberto, dubbed "Roundabout Roberto" by a scornful public, is now out of a job and the roundabout is being redesigned.

Despite accusations that they were rushing things and not properly protecting the waterfront, Clearwater commissioners put on the ballot a massive downtown redevelopment plan, a small component of which involved long-term leases of publicly owned waterfront land. Clearwater voters slammed the plan in the July 11 referendum and have called for commissioners' resignations.

The Marina Park project is nowhere near as large as either of those Clearwater projects, but it could become just as big a community stumbling block if mishandled. Residents of Safety Harbor have a special feeling about that small strip of green space on the bayfront. They want to make sure that any changes made there are not offensive.

Safety Harbor commissioners need to work on building community support for the park project before moving ahead. They should hold a special meeting or two to fully explain the project and gauge public reaction. They should post renderings of the current designs in the park and at City Hall for people to study.

And they should be prepared to hear public criticism of the process that brought the city to this point and be ready to learn from it.

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