City staffers are recommending a process to reconcile three different plans for updates to Brackenridge Park — a move they hope will put to rest several years’ worth of conflict and resolve differences over the park’s future.
“We were not in this place two years ago,” assistant city manager Lori Houston said. “The city, the Brackenridge Park Conservancy and the community; we were arguing, we were fighting about what projects and what is the direction.”
The city’s Office of Historic Preservation, which is overseeing the reconciliation work for capital improvements at Brackenridge Park, has come up with an evaluation tool intended to aid in consolidating the previous redevelopment plans and prioritizing projects for the 125-year-old park.
City staff and consultants presented the tool, a matrix of principles and priorities based on public and stakeholder input, to members of the Midtown Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone (TIRZ) board on Monday and during a final public input session Tuesday evening.
City Council will vote on whether to adopt the evaluation tool for capital improvements at Brackenridge Park at a future council meeting; the date is not set.
Three previous studies of the historic park include the 2017 Brackenridge Park Master Plan, the 2021 Brackenridge Park Cultural Landscape Report and the 2019 Midtown Regional Center Plan.
Debates over those plans often got heated, and even led to a lawsuit. The conflict arose again during the public meeting Tuesday, with several attendees complaining that ongoing bird mitigation activities — “board clapping” — disturbed Easter weekend campers and that birds have disappeared from the park.
“Are we going to have that every year during Easter?” asked Indigenous environmental advocate Matilde Torres, who has previously spoken against changes to the park approved by the City. “We’ve told you many times what that place means to us. It is sacred for us, it continues to be sacred for us and will continue to be sacred for us.”
Discussions around the city’s proposals to update the park have been contentious for several years. Neighboring residents and special interest groups have pushed back against plans that they said would affect flora and fauna and increase noise levels, and that didn’t take into account native peoples’ history and use of the park.
Updates to the declining park were approved by voters as a part of the 2017 municipal bond. The first phases of those updates are underway. Any plans included in a second phase will be evaluated and approved through the proposed guiding principles and the new criteria tool.
Nearly a year ago, City Council approved $150,000 in funding from the Midtown TIRZ to support a new planning effort for the park, which has been led by a 23-member Brackenridge Park Stakeholder Advisory Committee.
In January, the committee initiated a series of public meetings and a survey to prioritize an inventory of suggested projects for restoring and improving the 400-acre park.
When asked what the most important aspect of the park is, survey respondents ranked highest the natural areas and trees in the park. The river and nearby areas came in second in importance to respondents, followed by open space and recreational areas.
The survey also asked about parking preferences and other topics.
Evaluation questions
The feedback from the survey and public comments was used to develop eight guiding principles and an evaluation tool and process that will be applied to future decision-making about park projects, said Allison Chambers, a principal in the architecture firm FPC, which served as a consultant to the process.
The guiding principles are a set of yes-and-no questions that will be reviewed for each project resulting in a comparison matrix. They include:
- “Does the project promote inclusivity and avoid privileging users based on class, race, cultural tradition, age, income, physical ability or other factors?”
- “Does the project promote free use of the park, and where possible, open access to areas of the park which are currently restricted?”
- “Does the project protect or enhance natural resources and habitat and integrate nature into the recreational experience to further people’s connection to ecological systems?”
- “Is the project implemented for long-term sustainability including a plan for and funding of maintenance, operations and programming?”
- “Does the project honor and interpret cultural history including comprehensive traditions of use?”
- “Does the project preserve existing physical history where possible, or where not possible or nothing remains to be preserved, does it incorporate interpretation through a variety of means?”
- “Does the project take the entire history of the area which is now Brackenridge Park into consideration, including indigenous use, Spanish colonial development, the land uses precedent to establishment of the park and the history of the park itself? Further, does the project educate the public about that full history and include all periods of interpretation?”
- “If a project has internal conflict between principles but is still deemed worth of implementation by the evaluation process, does the project respect divergent principles through a balanced approach? No principle may be ignored.”
While not all projects would be expected to meet every guiding principle, the tool helps to evaluate a project’s worthiness and prioritization. But the first two principles — related to equity and access — should be required, suggested members of the TIRZ board.
“If a project can’t positively further the ideas that are the guiding principles, it’s not a project that we feel should be,” said consultant and architect Jay Louden of the firm Work5hop.
In addition to the guiding principles, subcommittee groups came up with a list of criteria for elements of the park such as the river and land that are evaluated on a point-scoring system.
“Our expectation is that now that we have a system, a real process, a real way to look at projects … they will use this tool which is built explicitly on the guiding principles … and projects will be shaped by them,” Louden said. “So this is not just a means to evaluate projects. It is a means to shape what projects are like in the park.”
The tool would be used throughout the planning process, Louden said, with public input included at varying stages through development and design.
Taylor Watson, who serves on the stakeholder committee as a representative of the Mahncke Park neighborhood, said the new evaluation process could help allow for more public input in park planning.
“[Brackenridge Park] is unique because it’s genuinely a ‘people’s park,’” she said. “There are constituencies from all over the city that use it and have a sense of shared ownership over the park, and they’re not necessarily the community members that always have a seat at the table.”
But more could be done, she added. “My biggest concern is that the tool is just part of a solution and [would] be treated as a solution itself.”
Attendee Ida Ayala told City staff she remained doubtful that the public would be heard in future planning. “I attended seven public meetings [in 2022] at the Witte Museum and none of our input was taken,” she said. “We spoke, but there were no changes made.”
The public input process was related to the Lambert Beach project of Brackenridge Park, Houston said, which was “challenging.”
“This is a separate effort,” she said. “We felt we needed a master plan and tool to help avoid this happening in the future.”
