Reuniting Courthouse Square

<p>The reunification of Santa Rosa’s Old Courthouse Square is still on the drawing board, but the first step in its construction will begin this summer.</p><div class="art_item art_item_inset art_item_facts"> <h3>Facts</h3> <h4>Details of the B street plan</h4> <p>Travel lanes — Narrowing the width of travel lanes, primarily along Healdsburg Avenue, B street and Santa Rosa Avenue, to accommodate the addition of bike lanes.<br><br>Bike lanes — Add striped, five-foot-wide, southbound-only bike lanes to:<br>Healdsburg Avenue and B Street from College Avenue to Fifth Street. <br>Eastbound First Street from B street to Santa Rosa Avenue.<br>Each side of Santa Rosa Avenue between First and Third streets and Third street from B street to Santa Rosa Avenue.<br><br>Traffic signals — Install a traffic signal at Mendocino Avenue and Tenth Street and a second one at B street between the Santa Rosa Plaza and Transit Mall.<br><br>Directional change — Convert the one-block, two-way section of Tenth Street between B street and Mendocino Avenue to one-way, eastbound only.</p> </div> <p>B Street, which parallels the Santa Rosa Plaza and is one of the primary feeder streets into downtown, will be reconfigured in a six-month construction project that eventually will have it replace Mendocino Avenue as Santa Rosa’s main cross-town corridor.</p><p>The motivating factor behind the B street project is the plan to reunify Courthouse Square by closing off the one-block section of Mendocino Avenue/Santa Rosa Avenue that now bisects the 1.5-acre park.</p><p>“In order to get the Courthouse Square project to go forward, this project will have to be done,” supervising engineer Steve Dittmer said.</p><p>Except for design work, the Courthouse Square project has been moving forward slowly since the SWA Group of Sausalito won a city-sponsored design contest and was awarded a $550,000 contract 14 months ago to develop a final design.</p><p>“We’ve had to hold off because the economy is so bad,” said City Councilwoman Jane Bender, who noted the reunification project likely will have to be built in phases as money becomes available.</p><p>The original price-tag for the winning design was pegged at $7 million but later ballooned to $13.9 million — money the city doesn’t have.</p><p>Critics have opposed the project because of its cost and concerns it is unnecessary and would dissuade shoppers from coming downtown.</p><p>A city-financed poll last year asking voters if they’d support another quarter-cent sales tax increase to offset the city’s budget problems found 75 percent of the 400 respondents cited the Courthouse Square project as a primary reason they’d vote against the tax.</p><p>City officials, cognizant of that criticism, have maintained that only state and federal grants and other outside funds would be used to reunify the square, the same approach the city used to build the $25 million Prince Memorial Greenway project.</p><p>Two federal grants totaling $1.4 million “should pay for everything” included in the B street project, Deputy Public Works Director Jason Nutt said.</p><p>The estimated cost of the project, expected to go to bid by May, has been pegged at $1.3 million.</p><p>Bender said the benefits of a reunited square — creating a prosperous and bustling downtown — outweigh the negatives, a point she said the city must make in doing a better job of communicating with the public.</p><p>“It will push up downtown property values, bring in business and sales tax,” she said.</p><p>“You could host art exhibits, concerts, dances, the Wednesday Night Market, even a farmer’s market in the square without having traffic roll through the middle of it,” she said.</p><p>The square was split in half in 1966 when Santa Rosa and Mendocino avenues were connected through its center. The change came after the county courthouse that occupied the site was razed because it had been declared earthquake unsafe.</p><p>The push to reunite the square — partly spurred by successes of downtown businesses circling similar squares in Healdsburg and Sonoma — began more than a decade ago.</p><p>SWA’s winning design shows a reunified Courthouse Square and the return of two side streets and parking at the west and east ends of the park that existed prior to 1966.</p><p>The drawings also feature a large glass waterfall wall, an arbor of overhead lights and several pavilions where musical and cultural events could be held.</p><p>The first step toward construction is finding a way to deal with the 13,000 motorists who now pass through the one-block section of Mendocino and Santa Rosa avenues that bisects the square, often using it as a shortcut between the north and south ends of town.</p><p>That first step would be B street project, Dittmer said.</p><p>The rerouting of traffic via B Street “would fill the gap” left by Mendocino’s closure at the square, he said.</p><p>“It will do three things. It will enable us to close off Santa Rosa Avenue through Courthouse Square when that project gets built. It will add a traffic signal at the Transit Mall to help with pedestrian crossings. And in the interim it also will allow us to accommodate traffic through downtown when the square is closed off for special events,” he said.</p><p>Nutt said the changes proposed for four-lane B street would be sufficient to handle both the 28,000 combined motorists who now travel the downtown sections of Mendocino Avenue and B streets, as well as future traffic projected through the year 2035.</p>