Austin: Don't sacrifice park's green space for museum better suited elsewhere

Harry Austin

Chattanooga's acclaim-ed downtown riverside rejuvenation hasn't come easy or quick. Nor, it seems, are all elements of it guaranteed to remain intact at Coolidge Park.

You would think we would know better by now.

Three decades ago, critics scoffed at the notion that the south shore, marred by dead riverfront factories, could be resurrected by a novel aquarium complex and new public amenities. City fathers questioned the idea of saving the decayed Walnut Street Bridge for pedestrian use: Who would want to walk across to the barren north shore?

Then came the visionary but tedious efforts to build a beautiful center city park on the bleak north shore, where a fenced Navy yard and worn factories ruled the riverfront.

Now, after the vast effort of civic visionaries, community advocates and generous donors to create the city's anchor waterfront park and riverside greenways - all spurring the city's urban revival - some city and county officials again seem blindly bent on risking diminishment of the public space of Coolidge Park. In doing so, they would set a terrible precedent for the security of parks across the city.

Never mind that it is the city's most popular and intensively used and visited park. They are moving toward signing over a 2.28-acre portion of the park for a military related museum.

The County Commission made the first move in February, granting approval to hand over this critical Coolidge Park parcel for a proposed Medal of Honor Museum without holding a bonafide public hearing on the impact to the park. In mid-June, the City Council passed a similar resolution on first reading - again without an impartial, timely and fairly administered public hearing process.

A few council members, however, responded to the city's apparent attempt to quietly slip the museum through the approval process when word leaked that Coolidge Park might be effectively downsized if City Council members failed to raise some pertinent questions about the proposal.

More than a few questions merit close scrutiny.

When parcels of land were being acquired in the mid-1990s to create what became Coolidge Park in 1999, the Chattanooga Theater Centre contributed its surplus 2.28-acre tract to help increase the park's current tight boundaries. Its gift came with a sharp caveat: If the parcel, which extends from the theatre center to the boundary of the Walnut Street Bridge, was ever allowed to be used for any function except Coolidge Park use, it would revert to theatre ownership.

That caveat may now come into play. City and county governments are apparently willing to put the theatre parcel on the chopping block at the request of a nonprofit organization, which wants to build a Medal Of Honor Museum there.

That action would breach not only the gloomy precedent of taking highly valued public parkland out of our best and most revered center city park for another use. It also would scrap the Theatre Centre parcel's share of all the donor and public tax money invested in the Coolidge Park by swapping that value for the museum's proposed $1-a-year lease payment for a 99-year lease fee.

Given that Mayor Andy Berke is planning an expansive $14 million rejuvenation of Miller Park, Miller Plaza and Patten Parkway, the giveaway price for the key Coolidge Park parcel is ridiculously low and astonishingly backwards. This valuable parcel appears to account for an estimated 40 percent or more of Coolidge Park's current green lawn space.

In fairness, leaders of the nonprofit organization promoting the Medal of Honor Museum have said they would leave all the acreage available in the park parcel outside the museum's 6,886-square-foot footprint in use for Coolidge Park. But would their successors keep that promise?

They've also said they would raise all the money - an estimated $8 million, plus a sustainability endowment - to build and manage the museum. They further argue that the museum would appropriately honor Chattanooga's Medal of Honor recipient Charles H. Coolidge, for whom Coolidge Park is already named.

Regardless, the core issue is how well the city and county governments keep our parks intact, and add to them rather than reduce them, as our growing urban population expands the need for more park space. That is the primary question for our government leaders.

There are, as well, other locations where the museum would seem more fitting. As advocates note in their prospectus, Medal of Honor awards sprang from the Civil War, including 33 Medals of Honor for the Chattanooga Campaign in 1863.

Of the roughly 3 million tourists who visited Chattanooga in 2014, their prospectus claims, some 900,000 visited the military National Park system here. Most of those likely toured the renowned Chickamauga-Chattanooga National Military Park, headquartered in Fort Oglethorpe, the nation's first such park. A partnership and annex museum there surely would bolster the museum's current 500 monthly visitor rate at its current museum location in Northgate Mall.

If city and county officials do end up politically appeasing the proposed lease arrangement for the museum in Coolidge Park, they will have to juggle complicated negotiations with the Theatre Centre and the museum proponents. They also must insist, in their memoranda of understanding, on specific criteria in the contracts to prevent another debacle like the utterly failed Chattanooga History Museum project, which squandered upwards of $10 million and left no museum.

Some seasoned lawyers suggest, at minimum, these core criteria:

No lease to be executed before design approval by city and county government; before full funding for the project on a designated timeline is begun; before full funding to expeditious completion is secured; before contractual agreement to leave all park space outside the building's footprint in the public domain of Coolidge Park; and full agreement that the land and building reverts to Coolidge Park if it ever becomes something that is NOT the museum.

This is worrisome enough, but it doesn't have to end this way. Better would be to mind the higher public value of keeping our already tight Coolidge Park intact as is, and affirming the honor already accorded to Mr. Coolidge for the complete park.

Harry Austin is the former editor of the Chattanooga Times editorial page.