14 September 2018

Filling In The Old Donut-Hole With A New Reclamation Project

Here's the latest attempt by your City of Mesa government for a public plaza with a water feature and a seasonal ice skating rink to take the place of an asphalt-heat island parking lot right next to the monstrously ugly uninspiring piece of bad architecture  8-story Mesa City Hall on Main Street across from the International Design Award-Winning Mesa Arts Center at the Center/Main Light Rail station platform. It's a mini-billboard promotion for a proposed bond project.

Your MesaZona blogger is puzzled seeing a sign behind City Hall Plaza for a landscape "revitalization" funded by a conversion grant from the Bureau of Reclamation > > > > Was this land contaminated or toxic sometime before to qualify for a conversion grant with remediation in the form of the scant landscaping on the perimeters on the north side parking lots behind City Hall fronting on Pepper Place? Mebbe it's a far better idea to either demolish ugly City Hall or convert it to luxury condos for those real estate speculators who can make millions in private wealth-creation??? 
This new Proposed Bond Project now in a big public relations push to get voters to approve the proposition for the 2018 General Election is a foil for the scheme to trick voters to approve $75,,000,000 in financing for the new construction of one 120,000 sq ft building on the other side of the parking lot aka "Public Plaza"  programs from ASU. ASU can well afford to finance its own new building, without hikes in transaction TPT sales taxes and utility fees
Two years ago VOTERS REJECTED IT. Let's just re-package that  $200,000,000 screw-up scheme for an satellite ASU campus on that parking lot space and say it's a "public plaza" --- is that what you see in the conceptual rendering by Perlman Architects for the proposed one building on a tree-lined public plaza??????????????
Before these schemes in 2018 and 2016 here was another for City Center circa 2014. The problem? They didn't know how to finance it, but take a look at all the plans for buildings in the parking lots next to and behind City Hall from Main Street to Pepper Place and 1st Street. . . and you might as well take a look on adjacent proposals east of Centennial Drive also at the bottom right-hand corner - there's land parcel there of three or more buildings ripe for development.
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Before all this was this:

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