What makes the “Arena Site” downtown so important, all the players say, is that it is the western gateway to downtown Tucson.
You get off I-10 at Congress, go east into downtown, and there it is, on the southeast corner: 8½ acres of decomposing pavement with a temporary Greyhound station in the middle. It could be, and should be, so much more.
Transforming it was the idea of a Rio Nuevo bidding process that has just ended, thanks to losing bidder Ron Schwabe giving up his appeal. Now negotiations with winning bidder Allan Norville are underway, and soon we could have a contract for the redevelopment of the area, with construction getting underway as soon as March.
But what is unlikely to be guaranteed by contract is the plan for the most important spot within the site: The corner of Congress and the I-10 Frontage Road, where Norville’s plan calls for a “visual arts center” and public plaza.
“The purpose of the negotiations, from our perspective, is to get commitments from the developer, time frames, and enforceable benchmarks,” Rio Nuevo board chairman Fletcher McCusker told me. “We’re honor bound to his proposal.
“In a procurement, you don’t have latitude to renegotiate the whole deal. The proposal is what got him to the table.”
In other words, the content of Norville’s proposal is not up for discussion because it won the bidding, even though the bidding was hijacked by board member Alberto Moore, whose one-sided scoring of the proposals gave Norville the victory.
That’s OK, to an extent. After all, the problem with several downtown projects has been the lack of conditions put on developers to follow through with their plans after getting sweetheart deals.
The problem is that Norville’s plan, which has merit overall, emphasizes the development of his adjacent property to the east of the arena site. That’s the part that is scheduled to begin construction of a dazzling new gem-show exhibition hall in March, to be completed by December 2015.
The plan calls next for moving the Greyhound station, then completing a parking structure, then building a hotel, then constructing apartments. All that is to be done by December 2016. It leaves for last the nebulous plan to put a museum and public plaza on the gateway corner at Congress and the Frontage Road, projecting completion in December 2017.
Under Schwabe’s proposal, the plan for the corner was simple and seemingly attainable if not awe-inspiring: A Drury Hotel was to go on the corner, with a restaurant and fountain courtyard behind it to the north along Congress.
Norville’s proposal for that corner reminds me of the many scrapped Rio Nuevo plans of yesteryear. You may recall from 1999 plans for a Sonoran Sea Aquarium, Arizona Historical Society Museum, Flandrau Universe of Discovery Museum and Smithsonian Museum of the American West at Rio Nuevo. You may recall a Rainbow Bridge. Obviously, none have come to fruition.
But in Norville’s mind, the visual arts center is practically built already.
“That is the most exciting thing in this whole proposal,” he told the Rio Nuevo board Aug. 11. “I’ve been working on this for 4 years. I’m not going to get into how we’re going to do this, but this will come about.
“This will happen if you let us do it,” he added. “The visual arts center can be done.”
Norville declined to comment for this column because of the ongoing negotiations with the Rio Nuevo board.
The proposal for the center depends on the participation of the University of Arizona. Indeed, Provost Andrew Comrie spoke of the UA’s hopes to house some of its collections at Norville’s proposed center during the presentations by the competing bidders in August.
On Friday, Comrie told me the university remains “very interested,” but acknowledged, “There’s really nothing definite at all at this point.”
The University of Arizona Museum of Art and its Center for Creative Photography could put some of their collections in the new center, he said. So could the Arizona State Museum and the UA Mineral Museum.
“On campus, the stuff that’s on the walls is just a fraction of what’s in the archives,” Comrie said. “More visibility would be great.”
The big question, of course, is money. How the construction of the center will be paid for is unclear in Norville’s proposal. Charts that depict the occupancy, employees and tax revenue of components such as the hotel and apartment tower in the project leave the spaces for the visual arts center blank.
Even if the center can be constructed, then who pays to maintain and operate it? It’s pretty clear who won’t
“This is not the kind of thing where the UA is going to underwrite a huge investment,” Comrie said. “That’s not going to happen.”
Considering that this is the key “gateway” site to western downtown, and considering that there is nothing firm about Norville’s plans for the site, and considering that museum plans have fallen apart regularly in Rio Nuevo, it would seem important that the Rio Nuevo board go beyond performance measures for this part of the Arena Site plan.
Before the board signs a contract with Norville, let’s have some guarantees that the visual arts center is much more than another exciting but hollow vision for downtown Tucson.
