Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Temporary green space a bargain for Roanoke
Shanna Flowers
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Anyone downtown in the past few weeks probably has noticed the new "green space" at Campbell Avenue and Third Street.
The half-acre site next to the city jail and behind the courthouse is beautifully landscaped. It contains a wooden arbor, butterfly bushes and paths that lead to sturdy metal benches.
You or I would call it a park. But city officials warn that because the oasis will be temporary, we shouldn't get too attached to it. The city eventually plans to expand the courthouse onto the site.
"Green space," "park," whatever you call it, like any city project in Roanoke, this one hasn't come without some grumbling.
The writer of an e-mail that landed in my inbox was "enthralled" and "mystified ... at the amount of time, money and man hours ... being sunk into the new park in the ruins of the old police department."
Frankly, the idea of more green space in downtown's concrete jungle is appealing. For workers on the western edge of downtown, Elmwood Park is the next closest green space, and that is more than a few paces away.
At the same time, taxpayers are right to expect city officials to be good stewards of their money.
So I put out a few calls to get a sense of whether the new green space actually was "a lesson in municipal mismanagement," as the writer noted.
After talking to Charles Anderson in the city's engineering department and Steve Buschor in parks and recreation, what I came away with was that city officials could have planned more efficiently, but that taxpayers had not funded a boondoggle.
Anderson said the preparation and demolition of the building costs about $390,000. About $200,000 of that was spent before the structure came down to remove asbestos, hydraulic fluids in the building's elevator, coolant in the air-conditioning system and other chemicals to avoid polluting the site.
The other $190,000 was for razing the building and sidewalk repair afterward.
The green space cost $29,000, Buschor said. That included everything -- including sod, bushes, benches, the crushed rocks on the paths, mulch and the arbor. City workers did the planting and installed the equipment down to building the trellis, he added.
Buschor said his staff includes horticulture, arbor and urban forestry experts who use their skills every day throughout the city.
"Our goal is to create this wonderful space that people can use," Buschor said last week.
The project began in May when the old annex was torn down, Anderson said. After the building came down, the contractor spent June and July separating steel, concrete and other materials. Not all landfills take the same materials, so they have to be sorted.
Once the land was cleared, Anderson said, the state requires erosion and sediment provisions. That included plastic fencing and filter fabric that allows water to run through but prevents dirt and other sediment from running onto nearby sidewalks, roads and into the storm drains.
Because the city had not yet determined what to do with the site, Anderson said, the engineering department was responsible for making sure grass was planted.
The city seeded most of the site with permanent grass seed. It later reseeded some patches that didn't grow and seeded places that purposefully were skipped the first time to allow sidewalk repairs along Campbell Avenue.
The seed cost a few hundred dollars, Anderson said.
He said that last summer's limited rain forced the city to water the site every day.
The site had only two sprinklers, he said. So between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. on weekdays, city workers moved the sprinklers to a different spot about every hour. He had no estimate for the cost of watering.
The city then approved the green space, and engineering turned it over to Buschor and the parks department in September.
The department excavated some of the planted grass for the paths and covered other areas with dirt hauled in to build berms and sloping.
That's where the inefficiency comes in. If the city had planned better, the initial seeding could have been avoided, and the parks department could have begun its excavation earlier.
On Monday, Buschor said he didn't know how many man-hours his staff put into the excavation because he didn't directly oversee the project. No one was available to answer the question, he said, but noted the excavation was not a lengthy task because the employees routinely do it.
The land sat over the winter until mid-March, when the department began planting bushes, laying sod and installing equipment.
The green space seemed to spring up over night. Buschor said it'll probably last about five years. Everything, including the plants, can be moved to another site.
City officials are excited about adding green space to downtown.
For $29,000 plus labor, it seems like a pretty good deal.
Shanna Flowers' column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays.
