The next three weeks are important to the RTA Broadway Project. On March 15th, the city released the 30% design plan and a 30 day comment period has opened. It is important that we take this opportunity to clearly support our position on the project: Broadway is a critical arterial roadway for our community and must be built to support such a function.

As you recall, the RTA Board voted in December of 2014 to reduce the Broadway plan to a six-lane arterial plan with the use of bus pullouts to the “maximum” extent possible. The Citizen’s Task Force, established by the City of Tucson to provide input, recommended a “Starting Small Approach” focused on saving the maximum number of buildings. Unfortunately, this process was hijacked by a small, but very vocal and engaged minority group who wants to keep Broadway as it is.

The Mayor and Council adopted the CTF’s recommendation as the baseline for the design. At that point, the city began working towards final design of the future Broadway Boulevard.

The 30% design plan is much better than the CTF plan and includes numerous important changes. The lane widths have also been increased. We need our voices heard!

Broadway is a critical thoroughfare for our community and must provide increased capacity to support a vibrant and growing economy in Tucson.

Many members of the CTF, as well as the Broadway Coalition are protesting these improvements. Comments and input to the design can be made by the public until April 15th, however, those submitted by April 1st will be presented to Mayor & Council during their April 5th study session.  We need our voices heard!  Broadway is a critical thoroughfare for our community and must provide increased capacity to support a vibrant and growing economy in Tucson. The voters of our community already showed their support for Broadway to be a large arterial. It’s size must be preserved to allow it to function as an arterial in addition to being large enough to potentially extend the Streetcar route.

Call to Action:  Everyone is encouraged to participate in the review and provide support and input to the Mayor and Council. Documents can be viewed HERE. 

ACTION: Please state your support and comment HERE and sign the petition to pass the 30% plan Here.

We need our voices heard!

Tucson Mayor Council voted unanimous approval to proceed with the Broadway Widening Project Tuesday evening. The vote was not a final acceptance of the project baseline alignment but an approval to proceed with the integrated planning that will now be able to be done by the City Transportation, Planning & Development, the City Real Estate Department and the Regional Transportation Association (RTA).

A Citizen Task Force has been meeting for over two years, 38 meetings in total,  1,500 volunteered hours, to give input to the Mayor and Council on recommendations and were thanked by council and the audience for having brought the project this far.

Now, the City has the ability to proceed with negotiations with the property owners who have been so patient for such a long drawn out process, lasting 30 years for many.

Some expressed concerns over the latest changes known as the “Start Small” alignment that had come about in the first quarter of this year and was approval by the Citizen’s Task Force after opponents had gone home. Many felt it had been a ‘bait & switch’ leaving the City without the promised amenities that had been voter approved in 2006.

Paul Rosado, CCIM, a property owner along Broadway spoke at the public session to explain, “Tucson deserves a Broadway corridor with multi-modal transportation capacity not only for today, but that will take us far into the future. One of the primary things site selectors look for in a community, second only to education, is the infrastructure of the city. Using Phoenix or Denver as analogous to Tucson is a big mistake, those communities have multi-freeway systems, something Tucson elected not to do 30-years ago.” For these reasons the Broadway corridor has be functional and should have the amenities we were promised originally.”

“The mid-century architecture along Broadway may be nostalgic for some growing up here, but we have better mid-century architecture than these buildings in Tucson,” Rosado continued. “This portion of Broadway was for many of us growing up here, just another suburban neighborhood; those days are gone, it is now a blighted area in desperate need of revitalization,” said Rosado.

“Businesses along this 2-mile stretch are vacant and boarded up as they have been for years, so there is no reason for people to go there now,” said Rosado. “Whatever the City decides, they cannot ask the business owners to solve the parking problems that going narrow will cause or ask business owners to work out shared parking among themselves. It is the businesses that are victims here; we’re not the cause of the problems,” Rosado concluded.

So the Broadway widening project is now in the hands of Tucson City officials to finalize the alignment baseline design and proceed through the legal, financial and engineering process, as Mayor Rothschild summarized in the end. There seemed to be a great relief among a fairly crowded room full of people who stayed at the meeting four hours and waited until 9:30 p.m. to hear the vote proceed.

Properties along Broadway from Euclid to Country Club are being held hostage waiting a decision for Broadway Boulevard alignment. Properties owners and small businesses along the Broadway expansion corridor are tired of waiting and simply want a proposal to pass by the Broadway CTF and work to finally begin. The final meeting of Tucson’s Citizens Task Force (CTF) for the Broadway Boulevard Expansion will be held tonight. This will be the last opportunity to voice an opinion before final recommendations go before the Mayor and Council on June 9^th and seal the fate of all the small business owners and property owners who have been patiently waiting since 2006 when the decision by the voters was made for the $72 million initiative.

The project is expected to ease congestion and create an eastern gateway to revitalizing Downtown Tucson.

One of the property owners told us that when he moved there in 1986 they were already talking about Broadway widening. Basically, property owners along this stretch have been held hostage for a very long time waiting confirmation; “we can’t sell our buildings because nobody wants to buy a building destined to be demolished, and we can’t put any money into the thing to paint it or make improvements, because we won’t ever get that money back from the city,”  when they come in to condemn it.

 Photos shown in this article are only a portion of the businesses affected, from the north side of Broadway only, there are more on the south side of Broadway as well.  For Thursday’s meeting agenda CLICK Here.

The status of the Broadway widening was summed up by Ward 6 Councilman Steve Kozachik in his newsletter this week that we reprint here:

There’s a lot of design work left to do on the Broadway project. Whereas Grant has an alignment established, and now we’re just working on the land use details, Broadway is still working towards an alignment of the roadway. That’ll introduce the land use discussions that are yet to come.

The next CTF meeting is this Thursday, May 7^th at 5:30pm. It’ll be held at Our Saviors Church again – 1200 N Campbell Ave. The goal is for that group to finalize a proposed alignment that’ll come to M&C on June 9^th for us to consider. That’s a key step in this process, as it will open the door for real estate and our civil engineering staff to begin approaching property owners along the corridor and working on solutions for them to stay up and running or to relocate. Without an alignment to work from, those contacts cannot happen.

Last week, I asked staff to do a walking tour of the entire length of the corridor from Euclid to Country Club, maps in hand, to look at the challenges each property owner will face with the draft alignment the CTF will see on Thursday. I owe a debt of thanks to those who participated: Beth Abramovitz (civil engineer on the project), Nicole Ewing-Gavin (Office of Integrated Planning), Phil Swaim (consulting architect), and Gene Caywood (consulting transit advocate). I also dragged along both Alison and Mark from my office. Since it was the hottest day of the year so far, all were thrilled to take me up on the offer.

Here’s an example of why the alignment is so important. Tucson Tamale Company and its co-tenants in Solot Plaza are going to lose parking. There are about 14 tenants in the center, each of which will need to decide whether or not they want to work together and figure out joint parking arrangements. Those conversations can’t happen until we finalize the alignment. Once we do, staff and our consultants can begin approaching individual property owners and explaining some options. As we learn which of them want to remain and which want to relocate, that information will open the door for creative parking and access solutions for those who choose to stay in their buildings. For example, if two or three of them want to go and those existing buildings are taken down, the new space can serve as a parking remedy for the businesses that remain. There are lots of moving parts to this, but the first step will be laying the draft alignment down on a map to serve as a starting point for those negotiations.

The City cannot compel solutions, but we can put the players together, show them options and let them sort out how they want to move forward. An example in the case of Tucson Tamale would be for them to approach the property owners who sit to the west and talk about leasing some of the covered parking you see at the edge of the picture. That’s just one of many options they’ll have to consider.

Another important piece of this is, of course, the budget. On our walking tour we identified some locations where, based on the existing draft proposed alignment, there are buildings on both the north and south sides of the street that are potential full acquisitions. Where we can shift the alignment one way or another, we can save the buildings on the opposing side.

Where there are significant cost implications for preserving one over the other, staff will take those factors into account as they refine the alignment.

There will likely be a loss of some contributing historic structures that sit on the south edge of the Rincon Heights neighborhood. In order to protect their status as a Registered Historic neighborhood, I’ve already confirmed with staff that the project can pay to have the boundaries of their neighborhood redrawn so the loss of individual structures will not impact the percent calculation they need in order to maintain their Historic designation.

This began in 2006 with the voters saying they wanted to eliminate about 120 private residences and businesses along the north side of Broadway in order to accommodate a 150’ wide, eight lane roadway. Getting to the point at which we now find ourselves is a huge win for the community.