Guidance for Park a Priority

Next week, a draft of a master plan for Balboa Park once again will come before the San Diego City Council for conceptual approval. The plan, which would guide the park for the next 20 years, has been eight years in the making.

In the past year, progress has been made on the thorniest issues, traffic and financing. But conceptual approval of the plan is still not certain and final details and precise plans are probably a year away.

The most difficult compromises have been how to balance the needs of the museums--institutions vital to the whole community as well as the park--with the need to protect and even increase open space, a dwindling resource in the center of the city.

Plans to reduce traffic in the central portion of the park--vigorously opposed by the museums, patrons of which arrive by car--have been scaled back. Cabrillo Bridge will be left open, probably one way; various experiments with shuttles and off-site parking will be tried and a garage will be built behind the Organ Pavilion before any parking spaces are converted to pedestrian use.

These compromises should assuage the fears of the cultural institutions’ directors, whose creativity and enthusiastic support will be needed to develop workable ways to provide access to the park for increasing numbers of tourists and San Diegans, without destroying the park.

That pressure of certain population growth is what makes the Master Plan so important and why there should be no further delay in approving it. Already, the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater and Science Center as well as the Old Globe Theatre have expansion plans in the works. Both plans have many benefits for patrons, and other cultural institutions are considering expansion.

The question facing the council is whether these plans should be approved before a “precise plan” for the Prado area and all of its institutions is completed.

This will be an especially tough call on the Fleet’s plans, which have been shaped to try to meet proposed Master Plan goals and have received conceptual approval by several planning bodies. The Fleet proposal will be the first to come before the council, presumably this fall.

While the Fleet’s plans would allow new technology and improve science education, the expansion also would add more than 300,000 patrons over the next 10 to 15 years. The Globe’s plans for a rehearsal hall and tavern would help the theater financially, but would take up some parkland. Both are significant expansions and should be considered in the context of plans for the whole Prado area and the whole park, rather than individually.

At some point there will be no more room for the cultural institutions to grow and still maintain the park atmosphere. To continue to serve the growing population, the institutions may have to consider satellite operations. That time may not be here yet, but probably will be during the life of the Master Plan, which makes a cohesive plan for the Prado area so important.

If the Space Theater and the Globe are asked to wait, however, then the onus is on the City Council and the staff to expedite their work on the Master Plan. It’s time to close the discussions and make the final conceptual decisions for the plan which will guide the park well into the next century.