Here's a look at where the smaller version of the Urban Lake would be built, on the downtown Dallas side of the Trinity River. (Lara Solt/The Dallas Morning News)
A zip line over the Trinity River. Spray parks. Fire rings. A BMX track. A climbing wall on one of the support piers of the Commerce Street bridge. Jugglers. Kayak rentals. Trails. An 18-hole, lighted disc golf course.
Months after moving ahead with a scaled-down – and seemingly more realistic – version of the so-called Trinity Lakes, Dallas officials and some key Trinity boosters are once again dreaming big with an unfunded $76 million list of potential amenities.
Though there were attempts to temper expectations that the veritable theme park between the levees was what could be – and not necessarily what would be – the sweeping schematics and the grandiose vision behind them proved irresistible for some.
“So many things in the corridor are possible once we allow our imagination to go there,” said Gail Thomas, director of The Trinity Trust, the nonprofit that’s pledging to raise all the funds to build the improvements.
Dallas City Council members briefed on the plan on Monday split in their opinions, as the presentation’s open-ended nature provided fodder for either side. And now the public, as is often the case with the Trinity, will have to wait and see what’s real and what’s not.
Is an additional lake seen in the plans going to be built under the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge or will engineering studies show that it’s not feasible? Will the lakes’ parking lots and access road remain or will they be bulldozed to make way for the Trinity toll road?
Will the plan be even halfway realized or will it join so many other fanciful Trinity proposals that are collecting dust on a shelf somewhere at City Hall?
“We’ve got to get realistic about what it’s going to look like down there,” council member Scott Griggs said. “We need to get the mythology out of this.”
Though the Trinity is perhaps most synonymous with the contentious and largely unfunded Trinity Parkway that’s planned to go between the levees, the lakes have been a central component of the city’s plans for the corridor for years.
The lake idea well predates 1998, when voters approved a $246 million bond program that set into motion what’s commonly known as the Trinity project.
So it was no small deal that the council in February voted to approve a $737,000 design contract for two smaller versions of the planned lakes. The action set the stage for the council to vote in coming months on spending $44 million to actually construct the lakes.
The 30-plus acres of starter lakes might not be what officials promised in years past: a 90-acre Urban Lake, a 56-acre Natural Lake and a 128-acre West Dallas Lake. But construction could begin next spring and finish – at long last – in 2016.
The slimmed-down plan – cheered by some as long-overdue progress and derided by others as “puddles” – also appeared to acknowledge that the grand plans pitched to the public over the years were really just pretty drawings.
That the massive reservoirs, epic promenades and futuristic amenities – think solar-powered water taxis – depicted in renderings weren’t realistic. That the initial Trinity bond money was only ever going to buy a small lake that could maybe be expanded.
Until Monday.
The drawings that accompanied the council presentation featured many of the same circus-like depictions that hyped up past Trinity plans. The grassy fields that comprise most of the Trinity through downtown Dallas are virtually unrecognizable.
And even as officials stressed that the plans would evolve – and that everything wouldn’t likely be built – the proposal’s details seemed, at times, to have little regard for the possibility that the amenities wouldn’t be built out in full.
The presentation, for instance, gave the same weight – a “note” in small font – to the fact that a proposed zip line over the Trinity would have to be operated by a concessionaire as it did to point out that the toll road would eliminate parking and the park’s access road.
(Explaining how people would access the lakes if the parking lots and roads were eliminated, Assistant City Manager Jill Jordan said officials would “have to figure out some other arrangement.”)
And naturally, the presentation stirred a proxy argument over the merits of the toll road.
Council member Sandy Greyson joined in blasting the drawings for downplaying the impact of the toll road on the park, even as she praised the lake proposal’s “aspirational” approach. Others, such as Sheffie Kadane, said toll road opponents need to get on board.
Council member Vonciel Jones Hill, a prominent toll road supporter, said she didn’t understand why an amenity-filled park can’t co-exist with the parkway. And as for the notion that the lake proposal might be unrealistic, she didn’t deny that possibility.
“It is clearly dreaming,” said Hill, who chairs the transportation and Trinity River project committee. “But Dallas gets reality by dreaming.”