The Chamber’s presentation to the City Council regarding the Temporary Parking Plan for the next two construction years was very productive. The draft was reshaped from some 20 possible policy and implementation action items down to 15 that are both cost efficient and doable. Most measures were adopted that night for immediate implementation while some will require additional Council resolutions to change previous policies.
The overall plan is depicted in this link Temporary Parking Plan which shows where new on-street parking will be developed and additional inventories of off-street parking will be made available. The next step is securing locations for additional directional signage to ensure that the traveling public passing through the project can find places to stop and patronize our downtown businesses.
The Chamber will be developing various informational products to advertise the parking opportunities that will be available during the construction period. One outlet is this bulletin, but there will be multiple additional digital and on-street outreach efforts to make our available parking easily obvious to our customers.
Again the biggest news this week is not about changes in the contractors’ schedule, which is holding steady with the downtown signalization, the digout around the former Mar Claire area, and the in-water Hoquarton work, but rather about a couple of sideboard stories.
There may be those of you who are wondering about the Hoquarton Park sculpture. As we have been informing folks at all of our public workshops, that sculpture was intended to remain in place and be integrated into the resulting post-project aesthetic Park landscaping. However, as storm drainage work was underway in the Hoquarton Landing area, the drainage plan sheets did not clearly indicate protection of the sculpture and it was pulled out, fortunately intact, to allow the storm drain pipes to be placed.
The contractor and ODOT are now developing concepts for replacing the sculpture, whether in the near–term or near the end of the project. ODOT has promised that one way or another, the sculpture will rise again.