Now that a plan has been chosen for redesigning the grounds of the Gateway Arch, it’s time to move into the next phase, which might be best categorized as “choose your adjective.”
On one hand, it might be the likes of “wonderful” or “inspiring,” the sort of vocabulary heard last night at America’s Center as 400 people attended a public meeting at which public officials and the winning design team discussed the latest version of the project.
Or the adjective du jour might be “surreal.”
Even for those of us enthusiastic about investing in a bi-state overhaul of the Arch grounds, it does seem for the moment that the project’s proponents are living in a bit of a parallel universe with regard to how to pay for it all.
Details, details.
One of the most unambiguous parts of President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech Tuesday was that America needs a five-year freeze on domestic spending. And he’s still to the left of Republicans in Congress who remain even more unambiguous about opposing any new government spending that smells like “stimulus.”
At last check, the Department of Interior’s budget is classified as domestic spending.
Whatever one thinks of all this, it didn’t provide the ideal backdrop—just 24 hours later—for the announcement that the price tag of the Arch redesign would be $578 million, or almost double the last figure of $305 million that had been suggested by the National Park Service in 2009.
In fairness, the Department of the Interior and local officials were adamant that no dollar limits would be provided to the competing teams in the yearlong international design competition that concluded in September with the selection of the team headed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates of New York. This wasn’t officially a cost escalation.
But is the Arch design wonderful or Wonderland?
Longtime civic leader Walter Metcalfe assured the audience last night that the plan was “not wildly expensive” and that “I don’t think we should be afraid of [the cost] because of the deficit.”
Added Mayor Francis Slay: “It will take a lot of hard work and determination, and it won’t be easy. We can get this done.”
Comforting words, but is any of this real?
We’ll see. In 2009, Ken Salazar, Obama’s newly installed Secretary of the Interior, was similarly enthusiastic about the Arch project in a local interview in which he promised “to move heaven and earth” to get the project finished by 2015.
Move heaven and earth? St. Louis shouldn’t be afraid of a supernatural task. We can get this done.
Can’t we?
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
