The Bluegrass and Beyond

Readers of Conde Nast Traveler magazine recently voted the 21C Museum Hotel in Louisville as the nation’s best hotel.

It was in the news last week and discussed on NBC’s Today Show this week.

“It sounds like the idea behind this is brilliant,” said Today Show host Matt Lauer, who seemed barely able to hide his surprise that Kentucky could be on the cutting edge of anything.

The 90-room luxury hotel that houses a public, all-hours contemporary art museum really is brilliant, and the Today Show and Conde Nast Traveler are just the most recent examples of the positive buzz it has created for Louisville.

The 21C was the brainchild of Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, who worked with Lexington-based Gray Construction to create the museum/hotel by renovating and connecting four century-old buildings.

The complex is not far from developer Bill Weyland’s Glassworks art and office complex and Louisville Slugger factory and museum. They are all on Louisville’s West Main Street, in renovated old buildings that less imaginative developers would have demolished.

These attractions have sparked a vibrant entertainment district popular with locals and visitors alike. Last year, the American Planning Association named West Main Street as one of the nation’s 10 best streets.

Gray Construction’s chairman, Lexington Vice Mayor Jim Gray, worked closely with Brown and Wilson to create 21C - and it wasn’t easy. Some of the buildings needed new foundations and steel reinforcement. “There was one day when we almost lost one of them,” he said.

But Brown and Wilson never considered tearing down the old buildings, Gray said. And it wasn’t just because the $180-a-square-foot cost of renovation was cheaper than new construction.

“They knew that the character of the old buildings was what would inspire and create the energy for the project,” Gray said. “Within the frame of the old buildings they were going to create something new and contemporary and inspiring.”

Last year, during Lexington’s debate over the now-stalled CentrePointe project, Gray often mentioned 21C as an alternative approach to the generic skyscraper developer Dudley Webb planned. Webb could create something special by saving some of the 14 old buildings he wanted to tear down and weaving them into a quality piece of contemporary architecture.

Webb wasn’t interested. The old buildings weren’t worth saving, he said, even though renovation would have been cheaper than new construction.

So, here we are more than a year later. The block has been cleared of 180 years of Lexington history. CentrePointe is stalled and probably dead. Louisville has 21C and a lot of national buzz. Lexington has a pasture in the middle of town and a missed opportunity.

But it’s not Lexington’s only opportunity.

A few blocks away, developer Barry McNees is scraping together money to create the Lexington Distillery District. His vision is to renovate two abandoned bourbon distilleries and other industrial buildings in one of the city’s long-neglected neighborhoods. They would become the nucleus for a mixed-use neighborhood reflecting Lexington’s heritage and authentic culture.

The Distillery District is struggling amid the credit crunch. Still, the 150-year-old Old Tarr Distillery warehouse has become Buster’s, a popular nightclub. Galleries and artists’ studios are sprouting nearby.

“You clean that place up and it’s a destination,” Gray said of the Distillery District. “There’s nothing like it in Lexington, and that’s what appeals to people.”

So here’s the question for May Jim Newberry’s administration and Lexington’s business leadership: Where should this city place its bet? Will a prosperous future look more like what’s happening on Louisville’s West Main Street, or what’s been happening for 30 years on Lexington’s West Main Street?

After announcing Tuesday that the state would find money to bury power lines along the Newtown Pike extension, Gov. Steve Beshear remarked that if we hadn’t done this project right, we would have regretted it for decades.

He’s right about that. And it’s scary how close it came to being done wrong.

Many people deserve credit for quickly changing the course of this project and saving it from mediocrity, including Beshear, Mayor Jim Newberry and several Urban County Council members.

But after city officials take their bow, they need to take a hard look at why this sort of thing happens too often in Lexington.

The Newtown Pike Extension has been on the drawing board in one form or another since the 1930s. As dreams turned into designs over the past few years, city officials promised the project would create a beautiful new gateway into Lexington, complete with a “signature” bridge.

Somehow, though, those dreams and promises didn’t make it into the state Transportation Cabinet’s blueprints.

Many people — including Urban County Council members — just assumed the power lines would be buried, rather than strung up on poles like those that clutter much of Lexington’s skyline. Not so.

Architects Graham and Clive Pohl, brothers who own property along the Newtown Pike corridor, sounded the alarm after Kentucky Utilities contacted them about buying an easement to string lines.

That created public outcry, prompting Newberry to ask Beshear for state help in paying to bury utilities and the governor to shake loose some Transportation Cabinet contingency money.

“Citizens got our attention on this issue,” Beshear said.

It was a good save all around. But the bigger issue is why the save was needed.

Lexington has come a long way recently in creating a vision for excellence in downtown development. Part of it is a desire to “clean up for company” before the Alltech FEI 2010 World Equestrian Games. Part of it is the realization that quality of life is a key component in economic development.

But if Lexington is to stop settling for second-best, we need to find the missing link that too often keeps vision from becoming reality.

Settling for second-best is how we get buildings like the suburban-style High Street Post Office and the federal prosecutors’ building on Vine Street, which looks like a cheap suburban hotel. It’s how we allow the city’s historic core to be demolished for ego-driven, pie-in-the-sky projects like CentrePointe and the World Coal Center.

We’re getting better with vision, but we often seem to lack the structure, leadership and will to make it happen.

The Downtown Development Authority has traditionally seen its mission as facilitating the plans of private developers, although, since the CentrePointe fiasco, Chairman David Mohney has talked about the need to serve a broader public interest. Still, the DDA has limited power.

Great cities seem to find ways to make developers, businesses, government agencies and utilities build in ways that are good for the whole city and not just themselves.

These cities don’t do it by trying to write rules for everything, or creating dense bureaucracies that discourage development. They do it by requiring that major projects undergo public scrutiny and professional review by people with expertise in urban design and planning.

Last winter, I wrote about how the nine-member Downtown Commission has guided the revitalization of Columbus, Ohio’s urban core. Many other cities also have effective design review boards to make sure new parts of the urban landscape fit in and contribute to the whole. Those boards have broad authority, and they don’t settle for mediocrity.

Distillery District developer Barry McNees said the ability of officials to find a way to bury power lines along the Newtown Pike extension is a promising sign for future development in Lexington.

“It begins to define the kind of urban DNA we want for downtown,” McNees said. “A lot of the concern was, if we’re willing to compromise at the beginning, where will we end up?”

Today’s meeting of the Courthouse Area Design Review Board offered a few updates on CentrePointe, the massive downtown development project that 16 months after its announcement remains a mirage.

Darby Turner, the attorney for developer Dudley Webb, said Webb is in Europe working to secure financing for the $250 million project from the estate of a mysterious, unidentified investor who is said to have died last fall, leaving the hotel-condo-office tower in limbo.

“We hope to have that (financing) in 30-to-60 days,” Turner said. But he quickly acknowledged, “We’ve been saying that, frankly, for some period of time, but all in good faith.”

The three review board members present seemed understandably skeptical. A year ago, they accepted Webb’s argument that he needed quick permission to demolish a dozen buildings on the block, including one dating to 1826, because his development was too important to delay.

Turner said today that once financing is secured, excavation work could begin within a month. Digging down three stories for an underground parking garage will take about three months. Then, foundations must be built before the proposed 35-story tower can begin rising from the ground.

The big issue, of course, is financing. The global economic meltdown has stopped similar projects worldwide dead in their tracks. The demand for big four-star convention hotels and luxury condos just isn’t what it used to be.

Because CentrePointe sits inside the historic overlay district of the old Fayette County Courthouse (now the Lexington History Museum), the review board had to give permission for the old buildings to be demolished and CentrePointe to be built.

The board gave that one-year permit last November. The permit won’t expire until November, but Turner was appearing to ask for a one-year extension. Now.

The board was confused. Why would Webb want an extension that would expire in July 2010 rather than asking in the fall and getting one that wouldn’t expire until November 2010?

Turner said having more lead time would “give assurance to our investor that this project is still doable in Lexington.”  He also said he wanted to avoid someone trying to challenge an extension in the fall.

What Turner didn’t say — but several people were thinking — was that it also would move the next renewal request, if there is one, to July 2010 instead of November 2010, when the mayor and Urban County Council members must stand for re-election. CentrePointe’s public credibility isn’t what it used to be.

Asked about that after the meeting, Turner said politics had nothing to do with his request.

Review board Chairman Mike Meuser, a lawyer, wanted to delay action on Turner’s request until the board’s next regular meeting in October. But a staff attorney told him that wasn’t allowed under city ordinance.

“It just doesn’t make any sense to me, either for the applicant or the community or the board to reauthorize these permits now,” Meuser said.

Still, the board ended up approving the extension request. Legally, it seemed to have no other choice.

In other news, Turner said J.W. Marriott, which Webb says plans to put a luxury hotel in CentrePointe, wanted interior design changes that will require some architectural revisions, such as moving elevators.

But Turner said the exterior design hasn’t been changed. I guess that means it still looks like some of those developments I saw going up around Atlanta in the 1980s.

While the review board was meeting at city hall, a bulldozer was rumbling around the CentrePointe site, three blocks west on Main Street. It was spreading fill dirt recently brought in so grass can be planted.

Despite the latest “30 or 60 days” estimate, I’m not holding my breath. CentrePointe may defy the global economic odds. Construction may really begin in a few months.

But I think a better bet might be on who will get next summer’s mowing contract for the empty block in the center of Lexington.

I first visited Vancouver to cover the opening of Expo ‘86. When I next returned in 2002, I noticed that a lot had changed in western Canada’s largest city.

I didn’t realize how much had changed until last Saturday. That’s when I attended a seminar at the University of Kentucky, Planning for Livability and Sustainability: Lessons of the Vancouver Achievement for Lexington and the Bluegrass.

It looked at how Vancouver’s focus on people-friendly development has improved the quality of life. In fact, the research arm of Britain’s Economist magazine calls Vancouver the world’s most livable city.

The seminar was organized by UK professors Ernest Yanarella and Richard Levine. Like the annual Commerce Lexington trip, it was an opportunity to look at other cities’ experiences.

Of course, it’s not that Lexington doesn’t already have a lot going for it. It could teach other cities a thing or two. But Vancouver is a good example of a city that never seems to be content with good enough.

Vancouver is twice the size of Lexington, with a metropolitan area population seven times larger. But the cities have some similarities, such as being surrounded by uniquely beautiful landscapes that are both valuable assets and barriers to growth that increase the cost of living.

The seminar’s main presenter was Ian Smith, Vancouver’s former senior planner and now project director for a large mixed-use development that will begin life as the 2010 Winter Olympic Village.

Smith said Vancouver’s approach to city planning and development has changed dramatically in the past two decades. The process began with Expo ‘86. When the world’s fair was over, its 165-acre site became the first of several old waterfront industrial areas to be redeveloped into mixed-use urban neighborhoods.

It isn’t just the look of Vancouver that has changed, Smith said. It is the development dynamic. Vancouver has become more aggressive about working with developers to make sure projects are as good for the city as they are for the developers.

“We needed to create a different model between the city and private developers that was win-win,” Smith said. “Local government needs to take a leadership role. It can’t be left to chance.”

Smith’s description of Vancouver’s development process reminded me of a similar system in downtown Columbus, Ohio, that I wrote about in February. Rather than asking developers to submit detailed plans based on a complex set of rules to a fragmented city bureaucracy, there’s a collaborative process aimed at making developments the best they can be.

That process includes public participation and a professional urban design review board, which in Vancouver’s case has 12 members — six architects, two landscape architects, two engineers, a developer and a city planning commission member.

Vancouver emphasizes good urban design, especially human-scale streetscapes friendly to pedestrians, bicycles and public transportation. Planning for large mixed-use projects doesn’t just consider utilities, roads, stores and schools, but child care, parks, indoor recreation facilities, public art and environmental impact.

Vancouver’s housing prices are among Canada’s highest, largely because of the constraints of being surrounded by water and mountains.

But Vancouver has shown that high-density, mixed-used neighborhoods can be great places to live.

With each new development, Vancouver has pushed for environmental innovation. A showpiece is the 2010 Olympic Village, the first phase of a new urban neighborhood that by 2018 could have 18,000 residents.

Like other cities Lexington has looked to for ideas, Vancouver has plenty of flaws. But its experiences offer some good lessons:

Lexington’s mayor and council must be aggressive about setting standards that encourage exceptional development. That means articulating a clear vision for high-quality downtown growth rather than reacting to disparate projects as developers propose them.

It also means engaging the public in meaningful participation and empowering the city’s professional staff to focus more on innovation and excellence than local politics.

One more thing: Lexingtonians must get comfortable with increasing density in urban neighborhoods. More density is good for the environment and will protect precious farmland. It also can make neighborhoods better. That will require leadership.

It takes a pretty good seminar to keep me inside on a warm, sunny Saturday when I could be out biking. But Planning for Livability and Sustainability: Lessons of the Vancouver Achievement for Lexington and the Bluegrass was fascinating.

The seminar today at the University of Kentucky was organized by UK professors Ernest Yanarella and Richard Levine. It was a followup to a similar seminar at the Kentucky Horse Park in 2007.

About 40 people attended, including Vice Mayor Jim Gray, Urban County Council member Diane Lawless and David Mohney, chairman of the Downtown Development Authority. I wish some others from council, the city planning staff and Commerce Lexington whose name tags I saw on the registration table had been able to come.

Ian Smith, Vancouver’s former senior planner and now project director for the 2010 Olympic Village, gave a terrific presentation about how his city has in just the past two or three decades transformed itself by bringing many segments of the community together around the goals of making Vancouver a model for urban livability and environmental sustainability.

Early next week, I’ll write more about that, as well as about the presentation by Mark Roseland, director of the Centre for Sustainable Community Development at Simon Fraser University near Vancouver. He talked about what that university is doing, and the role universities can play in helping a city and region improve its environment and economy.

But here was an interesting sidebar from today’s session:

Gray, who has been critical of the Downtown Development Authority for supporting the secretive development of the controversial CentrePointe project, said during a discussion that Lexington’s council members and the mayor need more help and leadership from senior planning staff members to make good policy decisions.

“We don’t have the level of competence that our city deserves in these roles,” Gray said. He added that Lexington government needs a change of political culture to allow senior staff members to feel empowered to seek out innovative ideas and help lead policymakers and the public toward good solutions.

That brought a sharp response from Mohney, who in addition to being the DDA chairman is a UK College of Design professor and former dean who has worked for years to involve students in helping Lexington do a better job of urban planning.

“It’s a tough town to make this work,” Mohney said. “It’s going to take time.” (quote corrected from initial post)

Lawless jumped in, complaining that the city’s bureaucracy is too fragmented. “It’s often like a shotgun, with each pellet being powered by a different division,” she said. “We need an urban planner who has that over-arching vision.”

Lawless said the result is a slow decision-making process where each interest group works with a different part of city government, but there’s too little coordination, leadership or vision. To help with that, she is pushing to have 16 recommendations from the lengthy Downtown Master Plan process finally adopted into  law.

Mohney noted that Lexington was at the forefront of American urban planning in 1958 when it created a growth boundary to protect Bluegrass horse farms. “The problem is we did nothing after that to redefine our growth strategy,” he said.

Lawless said this is a good time to do that, noting that the current mayor and council seem to have the political will to address tough, long-neglected growth issues. “The only way it’s going to happen is for us to roll up our sleeves and do something about it,” she said. “Now is the time.”

Soon, it was time for Roseland to begin his presentation. But the discussion continued for a few minutes on Twitter, with Gray, Mohney and Lawless — along with me and local bloggers Eric Patrick Marr and Taylor Shelton — typing away on their BlackBerrys.

Thanks to that social media platform, several hundred people could follow that conversation. It even prompted one of them — Rob Morris, owner of Lowell’s Toyota repair shop downtown and a budding blogger — to leave work and come over to listen to the rest of the seminar.

The Commerce Lexington trip began with several optional tours — Arts & Culture, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recreation, “green” Madison and downtown development.

I took the downtown development tour, which focused on an impressive new mixed-use project called University Square. It is a $180 million public-private partnership between a developer and the university that is built beside campus on a 3.4-acre site that had been a 1970s-era shopping center.

The most striking thing about University Square, which has won some design awards, is the clean, open contemporary architecture. One interesting feature is a roof garden on the fourth floor, with patio areas for residents and students and green plantings in trays around the roof.

About one-fourth of the space is planned for retail, although the poor economy has slowed that piece of the project. The university has one-fourth of the space, which is used for student services offices and space for student activities.

Half the building is a private development of upscale student apartments — 356 units that can hold 800 students. The apartments are quite nice — and not cheap. They rent for $1,000 per bedroom (units have one, two or three bedrooms).  Many students rent two-to-a-bedroom to save money.

At 1.1 million square feet, it is the largest mixed-use project ever done in Madison.

About $3 million in tax-increment financing was used for the enclosed parking areas, and the university invested about $57 million. The rest is private money, said Susan Springman, who works for the developer, Executive Management Inc.

The developer approached the university about the project in 1996. Construction began in 2006 and the building has been opening in phases over the past nine months. Springman said one thing that made the project possible was a close working relationship with the city.

This is one of the nicer of many new student housing apartment projects. Local officials say it has helped move students out of older homes in the neighborhoods surrounding the university, allowing families to start moving back into those and making the neighborhoods more stable.

If Tuesday’s public hearing had been at Keeneland instead of the Urban County Council chambers, here’s how I would have handicapped it:

The Lexington Distillery District project was the clear favorite. Everyone spoke of its good breeding and conformation, and they thought it was a great bet with the promise of a big payoff.

The CentrePointe development was a more complicated wager. Many speakers thought it was a beautiful horse, a sure thing. A few were skeptical, criticizing it as too big, ugly and lame to be a winner. Most, though, were willing to take the gamble, because the potential payoff seemed worth the risk.

Of course, horse races are over within two minutes. This one will last three decades.

What the Urban County Council and state officials must decide before the end of the year is whether Lexington can and should use tax-increment financing for these projects — two of the biggest developments proposed for downtown Lexington in a generation.

Tax-increment financing, or TIF, would allow Lexington to use 80 percent of new tax revenues generated by a huge private development in a blighted area over 30 years to pay for the infrastructure needed to make the development possible.

TIF will be a great deal for Lexington if the private developments succeed. Not only will the city get the developments, but it will get to keep tax revenues that would otherwise be shared statewide.

The Lexington Distillery District project is a textbook example of why the TIF law was created. The project would rehabilitate two former distillery complexes on Manchester Street and convert 28 of the most neglected acres in Fayette County into an entertainment, arts and multi-use neighborhood. Similar projects have worked wonders elsewhere.

The Distillery District’s developers are seeking $80 million in future tax revenues for such things as streets, sidewalks, utilities and parking. The developers plan $110 million in private investment.

The Webb Companies plans to spend more than $200 million in private financing to build Centre Pointe, a 35-story tower that would have a four-star Marriott hotel, 70 luxury condominiums, offices and restaurants.

Mayor Jim Newberry is working with the Webbs to use CentrePointe as the focus for a 14.25-acre, $48 million downtown redevelopment project that would include such popular amenities as improved streetscapes, a $16 million renovation of the old courthouse that houses the Lexington History Museum and a permanent home for the Lexington Farmers Market.

It also would include a lot of money for amenities that would directly benefit CentrePointe, such as an adjacent $10 million underground parking garage and two $1.5 million pedestrian walkways.

Architects have criticized CentrePointe’s design and size, preservationists opposed its destruction of historic buildings, and others have questioned its economic viability and secretive private financing. But most of the speakers at Tuesday’s hearing praised CentrePointe as a needed shot in the arm for downtown.

Unlike a horse race, these projects aren’t competing with each other so much as with global economic forces that have shifted dramatically since they were proposed.

As Lexington places its bets, we should keep this in mind: The payoff will come only if these projects can go the distance. There’s no such thing as a free ride, either in horse racing or in tax-increment financing.

Kentuckians like to say they bleed blue, especially during basketball and football seasons.

We also bleed black. Some say it’s because of coal, but I have a different theory: blacktop.

Kentuckians love asphalt, and we have spent nearly a century putting down as much of it as possible.

Like everyone else, I want to get where I’m going fast. I hate to sit in traffic. And, as a cyclist, I admit to being a pavement connoisseur. There is nothing like gliding down a lightly traveled country road on fresh, smooth asphalt.

I’ve recently reveled in biking on resurfaced roads such as Ky. 57 west of North Middletown and Hughes Lane west of Paris Pike. And I couldn’t be happier that the paving crews finally found that last, long-crumbling mile of Armstrong Mill Road.

At the same time, though, I’ve always wondered about Kentucky’s obsession with turning two-lane roads into massive four-lane highways when wider shoulders and a turn lane would do just fine.

I remember driving 1,200 miles around Ireland a few years ago on a family vacation. Only twice — south of Dublin and around Shannon Airport — did I see a highway as big as the mostly empty five-lane stretch of Tates Creek Road near my house.

In one of the more sensible things I’ve ever seen a governor do, Gov. Steve Beshear recently announced a program in the Transportation Cabinet called “Practical Solutions.” It calls for a review of the state’s 600 pending road projects, and all future ones, to cut waste without compromising safety. A major focus will be identifying unnecessary four-lane highway projects.

“It’s an initiative that makes sense,” Transportation Cabinet Secretary Joe Prather told Herald-Leader reporter Beth Musgrave when the program was announced Aug. 4. “People who like to design roads like to design a showplace, but it doesn’t necessarily make traffic move better or make a road safer.”

After two months, those reviews are still under way, and no projects have been scaled back yet, Transportation Cabinet spokesman Mark Brown said Friday.

A lot of people are watching to see what happens. Some are skeptical. After all, no part of state government has a richer history of power politics, patronage and corruption than highway-building. Blacktop has long been Kentucky’s political currency, and calls for reform are nothing new.

Even in the 1920s, politicians such as “Boss” Ben Johnson used highway projects to reward friends and punish enemies, according to state historian James Klotter of Georgetown College. There has always been so much money at stake. In 1930, half of all state expenditures went to road construction.

Prather’s predecessor, Bill Nighbert, and Leonard Lawson, one of the state’s biggest road contractors, are now under indictment for allegedly tampering with the bidding process for $130 million in state road contracts.

Aside from politics and corruption, though, highway-building has always symbolized “progress” in Kentucky. The bigger the highway, the more “progress.”

Some of that has been true. Adequate roads are vital to the economy, especially in remote, rural areas.

But some of it has been the sort of “build it and they will come” economic development nostrum that has left Kentucky with a lot of big, empty highways and big, empty industrial parks.

The Transportation Cabinet’s budget this fiscal year is $2.16 billion, although high gasoline prices and the sagging economy are sure to take a chunk out of it. Last week, Beshear announced that gas-tax revenues used for road-building last month were 11.4 percent below September 2007 and are down 4.5 percent through the first three months of the fiscal year that began July 1. So some big “Practical Solutions” savings will be needed.

But beyond balancing budgets, Kentuckians should use Beshear’s program as an opportunity to rethink priorities. This is a poor state with a lot of needs, and it can no longer afford to build lavish highways rather than invest in education and maintain the social safety net.

I wish Beshear’s initiative could have come sooner. I would have liked someone to take a close look at the $29.7 million project that is turning six miles of U.S. 68 in Jessamine County from one of the Bluegrass’ most scenic roads into a super highway sure to bring unbridled suburban sprawl from Lexington all the way to Wilmore.

Sure, U.S. 68 is too narrow. It needs some straightening, some widening, some shoulders and a few turn lanes. But this project, which is 28 percent done and scheduled for completion in November 2009, has always struck me as a $5 solution to a 25-cent problem.

It’s the kind of extravagance Kentucky can’t afford and would be better off without. Just think what a big chunk of that $29.7 million could do to improve schools, make college educations more affordable or lower taxes?

Just as Kentucky will never pave its way to prosperity, it will never solve all of its highway safety and transportation problems by building bigger, wider, straighter roads that just encourage people to drive more and drive faster.

In addition to good, sensibly-scaled roads, Kentucky must invest more in buses, streetcars, light rail, sidewalks and bike paths. Otherwise, we will continue spending too much of our limited resources to create an environment for cars instead of people.

If there’s one thing I learned from living in Atlanta for a decade, it’s this: Highways are like closets. If you have one, you’ll fill it up.

I’m sure it’s because I’ve heard too much of the slop that has replaced intelligent discourse in our presidential campaign. But as I listened Thursday night to Urban County Council members and others discuss whether to go forward with a tax-increment financing project tied to the CentrePointe development, one phrase kept running through my mind: Lipstick on a pig.

Granted, some good lipstick was offered up:

Developer Dudley Webb agreed to pay the estimated $50,000 cost of a state-required TIF feasibility study for his proposed 35-story CentrePointe tower, which would house a four-star hotel, luxury condos, offices, restaurants and shops.

Mayor Jim Newberry indicated, and Webb’s attorney seemed to agree, that any decision about building a $10 million parking garage under Phoenix Park could wait a couple of years until we see if CentrePointe is built and the garage is needed.

Those two moves made it more attractive, and less risky, for council members to let the CentrePointe TIF process play out, and they voted 10-5 to do just that.

It won’t hurt to further scrutinize the downtown redevelopment projects city officials want to pay for with TIF money. And it certainly would be good to have a public hearing, so citizens could have their say. That hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, Oct. 14, at 6 p.m. in the council’s chambers.

I’m skeptical of asking the state to approve a CentrePointe TIF project, for several reasons, not the least of which is that state law must be bent like a pretzel for this project to qualify.

Plus, as Vice Mayor Jim Gray keeps pointing out, a TIF project makes sense only if the development it is tied to makes sense. That’s because CentrePointe must be a long-term financial success to provide the tax money needed to fund TIF public improvement projects.

CentrePointe makes no economic sense to a lot of people. The mystery surrounding its financing — whether it is real, and where the money is coming from — deepens public skepticism. Last week’s turmoil in the financial markets offered further reason for caution.

When Webb unveiled CentrePointe on March 4, he said he needed TIF financing to make it work. Faced with public opposition, he then said he didn’t need it. Now, while claiming he doesn’t need it, Webb and his brother, Don, and nephew, Woodford, are working hard to get it.

Some council members speculate that the Webbs need the city’s TIF stamp of approval to secure financing for CentrePointe. Or that they need the $10 million city-owned parking garage. Or that they need the city on board so they can seek loan guarantees or other support if CentrePointe runs into trouble.

Some council members who support the TIF project argue that if Lexington doesn’t partner with CentrePointe, it could lose an opportunity to fund some much-needed downtown improvements, such as renovation of the old Fayette County Courthouse that now houses the Lexington History Museum.

They think powerful rural legislators will gut the TIF law next year, so Lexington had better grab what it can now. They may be right, but a flawed CentrePointe TIF application would only give those legislators a fat target.

And who could blame them? Is it in Kentucky’s best interest to build Lexington a downtown parking garage that’s twice as expensive as it could be? Or to spend $3 million on pedways between CentrePointe and two public parking garages?

It would be short-sighted for the General Assembly to abolish TIF financing. Despite Kentucky’s historic urban-rural jealousy, it’s more true than ever that cities are the economic engines that drive the state. TIF is a great tool for keeping those engines chugging along.

The General Assembly must move beyond the old notion that investing in the Golden Triangle is bad for the rest of Kentucky. Burkesville or Grayson aren’t competing with Lexington — Kentucky is competing with Illinois, and they’re both competing with the rest of the world.

The old Kentucky way of thinking focuses on whether UK can compete with U of L on the football field and basketball court, rather than on whether they both can compete with North Carolina and MIT in the classroom and laboratory.

The game should no longer be about how to divide Kentucky’s pie, but how to make the pie bigger. Sound urban TIF projects that conform to the law will do that. Flawed ones like CentrePointe probably won’t.

If Lexington does send a CentrePointe TIF application to Frankfort, I think state officials will view it as pork. And rural legislators know how to butcher a hog.

Beverly Fortune’s story Tuesday and my column Wednesday gave an overview of three alternative design concepts for CentrePointe that were developed over the weekend by students at the University of Kentucky’s College of Design working with prominent architects and designers from UK, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The goal of the 48-hour workshop wasn’t to develop finished designs or exact plans. It was to look at ways the 1.7-acre block could be used to accomplish the goals developer Dudley Webb has stated as well as to create inviting street-level space and a signature piece of architecture. The main goal, though, was to stimulate thinking and explore possibilities.

Here are some of the renderings the three teams came up with during the workshop, which was organized by Michael Speaks, the dean of the college, and architecture faculty member Drura Parrish. The workshop also included advisers from UK’s Historic Preservation Program.

The first group of concept designs was developed by a team led by UK faculty members Liz Swanson and Mike McKay. Swanson and McKay have been based in New Orleans for the past three years leading a UK design studio there. The second group was developed by the team led by Paul Preissner of Chicago, head of Quavirarch and a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The third group was developed by a team led by Heather Flood and Ramiro Diaz Granados of Los Angeles, partners in the design firm of F-Lab and faculty members at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Click on each photo to enlarge it.

I wasn’t surprised by the public’s negative reaction to three out-of-the-box designs dreamed up over the weekend as alternatives to Dudley Webb’s proposed CentrePointe tower.

A story in Tuesday’s Herald-Leader included renderings of the concepts developed during a marathon 48-hour workshop. The designs were done by three teams of students from the University of Kentucky’s College of Design working under prominent architects from UK, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The designs were unconventional. A couple of them were almost bizarre. They were nothing like traditional Lexington architecture. And they were nothing like Webb’s 1980s-style glass tower that has been criticized as too massive and bland to put in the middle of Lexington for the next century or so.

Readers posted dozens of comments about the designs on Kentucky.com — and most of them were scathing.

I understood the reaction. It was my first reaction, too.

Then I took a deep breath and thought again.

These weren’t finished plans, or even real ­proposals. They weren’t meant to be. They were creative ideas, developed quickly and offered up to spark other ideas that might lead to something special. That’s the way innovation works.

Like Webb, I was out of town Monday and couldn’t attend the students’ presentation. So I went over to UK on Tuesday to get a briefing from Michael Speaks, the college’s dean, who organized the workshop.

”It’s a lot of stuff to do in a couple of days,“ Speaks said before walking me through each concept. ”These are not final designs by any stretch of the imagination. But they show what can be done.“

Each team was told to confine itself to the block and try to stay true to the ­CentrePointe proposal — a hotel, luxury condos, a restaurant and retail space.

”These architects approached this in very different ways,“ Speaks said. But he noted that there were many things all of the designs had in common.

All three teams wanted to keep some of the historic buildings that have been a big part of the CentrePointe controversy and weave them into contemporary new construction. The most valued buildings were the Joe Rosenberg building, which dates to 1826, and the century-old building that housed The Dame music club.

All of the teams wanted to keep the Farmers Market on the block, and some added an amphitheater, a small park and other public space. Indeed, perhaps the most appealing part of all of the concepts was how they offered open, inviting pedestrian space at street level.

All three teams thought the project could be more effectively developed in phases, rather than all at once. And they all thought Webb was trying to cram too much square-footage onto the 1.7-acre block.

All chose to have several towers, rather than the one monolith Webb has proposed.

Speaks noted that in all of the designs, the towers were the wildest and least-finished part of the concepts — and the part that elicited the most negative public reaction.

”You look at these project concepts and think how crazy they are,“ Speaks said. ”Then watch the Olympics, look at what they’ve recently built in Beijing, and think again. They won’t look so crazy a month from now.“

By late afternoon Tuesday, more than 1,500 people had voted for their favorite design in the Kentucky.com poll. Webb’s design was leading the closest alternative 2-to-1.

”We’d be surprised if CentrePointe wasn’t winning, in a way,“ Speaks said. ”A lot of people want to support what’s easy, what they’re used to seeing, what’s being done elsewhere.“

Of course, the workshop process was all backward. This type of brainstorming session should have been done at the beginning, as has been done by developers of the proposed Lexington Distillery District project on Manchester Street.

Architecture workshops like this are intended to look at the location, the surrounding areas, and the needs a building is trying to satisfy, and to explore ways to meet those needs.

The goal is to produce a design that solves all of the development’s ”problems“ and adds something more: Value for an entire area, or even a city.

CentrePointe, on the other hand, was developed in secret and unveiled as a done deal. Webb has wanted no creative or public input. So it looks like we’re stuck with a piece of recycled architecture two decades out of date.

CentrePointe seems to be a done deal, and Webb might continue to thumb his nose at critics.

But public discussion surrounding CentrePointe and the awareness of downtown development it has created might pay off in the future.

”I don’t care how many people laugh and make fun of these projects,“ Speaks said as he paged through the three workshop concepts on his desktop computer.

Then he clicked on ­Kentucky.com to check the latest online poll results.

”If we can get 1,500 people to look at these ideas and think about design, then we’ve accomplished something.“

We’ll never be the belle of the ball if everyone knows we’re easy.

That’s how I ended my first column about CentrePointe, soon after Dudley Webb unveiled plans for his $250 million luxury hotel, condo and retail complex.

I was likening Lexington to a debutante who fancies herself as someone special, yet rushes into the arms of any real estate developer with a hot proposition.

So here we are, nearly four months later. Where does the belle find herself?

She’s considering a shotgun marriage to the CentrePointe developer. Why? Because it could be an easy way to get some downtown goodies. Or maybe not.

When Webb announced CentrePointe in early March after two years of behind-the-scenes work, he said the financial plan included as much as $70 million in tax increment financing to pay for related “public” improvements. Those were described as such things as a parking garage under Phoenix Park and public art.

Kentucky’s tax increment financing program — known as TIF — is a great tool that allows a city and the developer of a “signature” project to work together to rehabilitate a blighted urban area. With TIF, some of the future taxes generated by the private project are used to pay for “public” improvements near the development.

Now, Webb says he doesn’t want any more public meddling in CentrePointe and he has enough private financing to build without TIF. But no TIF, no public improvements.

Webb’s attorney, Darby Turner, said the developer would only apply for TIF financing if the Urban County Council asks him to. The council will vote Thursday on whether to do that.

Council members were told for the first time Tuesday that representatives of Webb and Mayor Jim Newberry have discussed trying to use TIF money for a long list of downtown projects, including a much-needed renovation of the old courthouse. Also, Turner said that instead of $70 million, only $35 million or $40 million might really be available for public improvements.

So how would this all work? How much money could really be available to the city and what could it buy? Nobody seems to know.

In fact, Tuesday’s meeting was the first time council members had really ever discussed CentrePointe TIF. Several council members had some very basic questions about TIF, and the only knowledgeable person there to advise them was Webb’s consultant, John Farris.

Council members are being asked to make a quick decision with little information. Some of them are angry about it, and who can blame them?

“What this motion asks us to do is … ask if we could tag along with the CentrePointe project and maybe get some public amenities out of a deal that’s already done,” Councilman Tom Blues said. “What we see here is a failure of communication, of cooperation, of public involvement, of openness, and I’m disturbed that it has come to this, because it really indicates a significant civic failure.”

Councilman Don Blevins said more study is needed to see how CentrePointe fits with potential city redevelopment projects a couple of blocks down Main Street. Blevins noted that decisions the council is about to make could shape Lexington for a century or more and shouldn’t be rushed.

And he added: “It feels a little strange hitching our TIF wagon to a project some of us don’t like. My fear is that a large four-star hotel with huge condominums on top of it is going to fail. I hope I’m wrong. I hope they’re wildly successful and the downtown is vibrant and we sell all those condos and the hotel is full from here to eternity. But what if I’m right? What we’d have is essentially a vertical Lexington Mall right in the heart of downtown.”

Vice Mayor Jim Gray also questioned CentrePointe’s economic viability. And he wondered whether a CentrePointe TIF would even be legal because developers say it’s not essential to build their project.

Gray has been among the most outspoken critics of CentrePointe because of Webb’s refusal to allow public input on the project’s design — and Webb’s insistence on demolishing the block’s historic buildings rather than trying to incorporate some elements of them into the new building.

“I’ve learned over time that this business of building and developing is a whole lot more about process than about project,” said Gray, who is president of a large construction company.

On Tuesday, Gray read to his fellow council members from a “best practices” guide to Kentucky TIF projects. It recommended thorough study, public participation and community buy-in — none of which has happened with CentrePointe.

It might be too late for anyone but Dudley Webb to influence what happens on the CentrePointe block.

But the future of downtown shouldn’t rise or fall on one project, no matter now big it is. Council members should slow down, think things through and look at all of the options.

Two other TIF projects have been proposed for Lexington — an arena to replace Rupp and a large downtown entertainment district along Manchester Street. Given the redevelopment opportunities downtown, there could be the potential for several more big projects.

The best course of action might be to tell Webb to go ahead and build CentrePointe on his own.

City officials could then do what they should have done long ago: Engage the public in a discussion about what downtown Lexington needs and what it might get from a TIF partnership. Then the city could seek out a developer who is interested in a true partnership.

Blevins said it all: The decisions we are about to make will shape Lexington for a century or more and shouldn’t be rushed.

An intentional courtship would make a lot more sense than a shotgun marriage.