MSD board unanimously votes to proceed with park-topped, at-grade Logan Street CSO basin

Apr 28, 2016

It’s official! Smoketown’s Logan Street CSO Interceptor, a project by the Metropolitan Sewer District (MSD) to fix Louisville’s combined sewer overflow (CSO) problem, is going to be built at grade with a park on top. And that’s good news for much more than the Smoketown neighborhood in which the project sits.

Monday’s unanimous decision by the MSD Board of Directors dates back seven years to 2009 when the project was announced. Louisville, like most other cities in the country, is under a consent decree with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to get its act together about raw sewage dumping into local waterways when the city’s older sewer system is inundated by rainwater. (Newer parts of the city, typically the suburbs, have a separate sanitary and storm sewer system.)

What’s a CSO basin?

The original raised design for the Logan Street CSO Interceptor. (Courtesy MSD)

The Logan Street CSO Interceptor is one of 12 concrete basins slated for various parts of the city. Essentially, these enormous sealed buckets hold the offending CSO—millions of gallons of it each—until the sewer system is able to handle operations normally. The basin’s contents are then pumped back into the normal sewers on their way to treatment.

The Smoketown facility is planned to handle CSO events in the region of the South Fork of Beargrass Creek.

But Smoketown’s 17-million-gallon facility, the first of the bunch planned in 2009, was designed differently. Where the subsequent 11 basins are all designed as at-grade facilities, minimizing their impact to their surroundings, the Logan Street and Breckinridge Street basin was planned as an enormous windowless warehouse sticking up like a sore thumb on a prominent site in the neighborhood.

A sleeping giant awakened

Needless to say, locals began to ask questions as construction began blasting the neighborhood. Neighbors began to talk and meetings were held to discuss the project, such as at the Smoketown Neighborhood Association.

“I do think that it really was a combination of grassroots advocates saying for a long time, this is not acceptable,” Ben Carter, an attorney whose office is a block from the basin site, told Broken Sidewalk this week. “ They said, explain this to us again. We don’t understand why this is being built this way.” And after a while support and neighborhood determination grew. “That made way for Reverend Williams [of Bates Memorial Baptist Church] to come into the conversation,” Carter added, noting how the prominent community leader gave gravity to the neighborhood’s pleas.

Carter, who began attending meetings about the basin last November, penned his own call for MSD to reinvest the $4 million price difference between the original raised basin and the 11 other at-grade facilities back into the neighborhood.

“This is an issue of environmental justice. And racial justice, and economic justice,” Carter told Broken Sidewalk this week. “That’s why I went to law school.”

A concept rendering of a redesigned facade for the old, raised design. (Courtesy DPAW / MSD)

MSD, which admitted mistakes were made in the Logan Street basin process, offered to defer around $700,000 allocated for bricks in the bunker design for a new use and brought in architecture firm De Leon & Primmer Architecture Workshop to work with the community on redesigning the raised facility.

At that facade redesign meeting, Rev. Williams made a speech about why he refused to participate in the redesign process, and over 100 Smoketown residents walked out of the public meeting. A letter signed by the Smoketown Neighborhood Association, Rev. Williams, Ben Carter, and Stephen Kertis of Kertis Creative was sent to MSD Executive Director Tony Parrott outlining the neighborhood’s position and requesting more significant changes to the project.

Tensions were growing and Metro Louisville and MSD responded quickly after meeting with community leaders. Mayor Greg Fischer and Parrott held a press conference where they outlined a plan—requiring MSD board approval—to negotiate a redesign the Logan Street basin as an at-grade facility topped with a park. It was beginning to look like the neighborhood had won the fight.

“We’ve been looking hard over the past several days to find an option to build at grade,” Parrott said in March, noting that the current point in construction is the perfect time to move in a different direction. “We’re in the preliminary phases of planning the solution and negotiating with our contractor,” he said.

The MSD board gave Parrott the necessary authority to negotiate a change order for the project, paving the way for this week’s crucial vote on whether MSD would allocate the millions more in funding to redesign the project. Whatever was to happen, the Smoketown basin is legally required to be operational by December 2017 according to the federal consent decree—timing was critically important.

The Meeting

The board meeting. (Courtesy Theo Edmonds)

As we mentioned above, the board voted unanimously Monday to approve the added expenditures and proceed with an at-grade, park-topped basin design.

“As the board, we must balance our responsibility of being good stewards of our ratepayers’ investments in MSD, the voices of the community, and the needs and concerns of the neighborhoods we serve,” Cyndi Caudill, MSD board chair, said at the meeting. The board room was packed to standing room only, and many community leaders were present, including Rev. Williams, Carter, Theo Edmonds, District 4 Metro Council candidates, and many others.

Parrott updated the board on the project status: “We have been negotiating with our contractor, Walsh Construction, and in your board packet you have Change Order #2 that includes major revisions to the facility,” he said, “by eliminating the proposed exterior, one-story brick building that covers the structure and replacing it with an at grade vegetated concrete cover.”

The total price tag for the change came in at $4.85 million, remarkably close to the price difference between this basin and others in the city.

With that brief update, the eight-member board was ready to vote. A motion was made and seconded, no further discussion was requested, and the vote was tallied as unanimous. With that official gesture, the crowded board room erupted in applause.

“I’m pleased we could make the change to put the basin underground,” Board Chair Caudill said following the vote. “And while this contract change will represent an increase in the total cost of the project, I view this as a sound investment in our water infrastructure and towards our overall goal to improve the community in which MSD resides.”

Reflection

With that vote, there’s big change coming to the area—and not just Smoketown. The basin actually sits at the confluence of four neighborhoods—Smoketown, Germantown, and Paristown Pointe, and Shelby Park. Each stands to benefit from the new public park that will be created on top of the basin, and each will be a better place now that the blight-inducing raised basin design is history.

Carter, who had seen the passion of the neighborhood first hand at meetings, noted the somewhat anticlimactic nature of how the long-fraught process was ultimately resolved in a beige board room. “It was very bureaucratic,” he said. “It was simply an agenda item on the meeting.”

The agenda item in the MSD Board packet. (Courtesy Ben Carter)

“I was thinking about it Monday: It’s interesting to me that all of this organizing and the meetings and things like that culminate in what is essentially the most bureaucratic ‘aye’ vote possible,” Carter said. “The agenda item, it’s just text. As an English major, I love the idea that this text here means the difference between a warehouse or a park. But at the same time, there was applause at the end of it. The people who were there cared about it.”

It’s that effort to simply care about one’s neighborhood that paid off in a big way this week. For decades, Smoketown has been left out, forgotten, and the recipient of many projects of the same ilk as the original bunker basin. But Smoketown is changing fast and learning for itself that it matters as much as Downtown or St. Matthews. It’s exciting to see that kind of transformation happen because it’s a signal that even more and better change is ahead. And walking around Smoketown, it’s clear to see that the momentum is building.

Support from mayors puts TIGER in line for slight funding boost

Transportation

By Branden Klayko -

Apr 28, 2016

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There’s good news out of the Senate committee responsible for doling out transportation funds.

Last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee okayed a small increase in TIGER funding, according to Stephen Lee Davis at Transportation for America. TIGER is the program that allows local governments to compete directly for transportation funds, circumventing state DOTs, and helps get a lot of walking, biking, and transit projects off the ground. It must be renewed every year, so its prospects are always in doubt.

If approved by the full Senate and House, the committee’s proposal would set TIGER funding at $525 million, a $25 million increase over the previous year’s budget.

Elected officials and civic leaders across the U.S. campaigned for funding TIGER. A letter signed by 25 mayors — including the mayors of Tallahassee, Kansas City, and Anchorage, Alaska — urge lawmakers to continue the program [PDF], noting that applications for TIGER grants have typically exceeded available funds by a factor of 10.

(Editor’s Note: Lexington Public Works and Louisville’s CART, the Coalition for the Advancement of Regional Transportation, also signed the letter, but Metro Louisville was absent from the list. Louisville’s only TIGER grant in the seven years the funding has been offered is helping to pay for changes to Dixie Highway.)

T4A’s Davis said the bill could be brought to a floor vote sometime this week. The same bill would also authorize $2.3 billion for New Starts, the grant program that funds major transit expansion projects, and $1.4 billion for passenger rail. Those funding levels are in line with what was laid out in the most recent federal transportation law.

[Editor’s Note: This article has been cross-published from Streetsblog. Top image of the Indianapolis Cultural Trail, which was built partially with funds from TIGER, courtesy the Indianapolis Cultural Trail.]

Listen as Broken Sidewalk discusses transportation on hour-long WFPL special

Transportation

By Branden Klayko -

Apr 27, 2016

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There’s been a lot of excitement since the long-awaited Move Louisville plan was released this month. And that’s appropriate given that this document will help shape how Louisville grows over the next two decades—whether it will be more business as usual auto-dominated sprawl or a change of course to bring us in line with 21st century transportation priorities.

Last Friday, I had the opportunity to sit down with WFPL’s Metro Reporter Jake Ryan, Metro Louisville Deputy Director of Advanced Planning Gretchen Milliken, and Bud Hixson of CART, the Coalition for the Advancement of Regional Transportation for an hour-long discussion of the Move Louisville plan and transportation in Louisville today. Listen below:

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/260394156″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Here’s a snippet from WFPL’s write-up of the program:

Klayko said in order to get resident buy-in on the plan, it has to be made attractive and easy. “One of the major challenges Louisville faces is our streets are particularly not safe for pedestrians,” he said. “The infrastructure is incomplete, the network is…if you’re going to have to walk in a grassy field on the side of Dixie Highway, most people aren’t going to walk. If we can re-imagine the way those streets work and have them work for everyone in an equitable way, I think more people might try and do that.”

We’re just getting started with our coverage here on Broken Sidewalk, so stay tuned for much more about Move Louisville and transportation in our fair city. Also, don’t miss our in-depth analysis of the Move Louisville plan over here.

[Top image courtesy WFPL. Yours truly in the distance behind all those microphones.]

New aerials show Spaghetti Junction’s enormous footprint in Downtown Louisville

By Branden Klayko -

Apr 27, 2016

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06-louisville-aerials-orbp — (Courtesy Ohio River Bridges Project)

When you’re zooming through Spaghetti Junction for most of the day when there’s no traffic, it might seem like the tangle of highway ramps isn’t really that big. Or if you’re stuck in construction traffic, it might seem like it never ends. Speed has a way of distorting our sense of distance.

But the reality is that Spaghetti Junction is an enormous part of our physical built environment in Downtown, Butchertown, and beyond. And while much of it is hidden behind unsightly industry, mini-storage, or barren lots, when you see the junction from the sky, its scale really begins to stand out.

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The Downtown Crossing segment of the Ohio River Bridges Project (ORBP) recently shared these aerial views of the junction taken this spring by HDR Engineering, and it’s apparent you could fit a large chunk of Downtown Louisville within the bounds of the highway.

For instance, Spaghetti Junction would stretch from Ninth Street to Floyd Street and from Main Street to Liberty if laid across the grid east to west. Placing it north to south would span from Main Street to past York Street. That’s a long ways.

Rendering vs. Reality: Thunder from the 800 City Tower

Design

By Branden Klayko -

Apr 27, 2016

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07-800-building-thunder-rendering-reality-louisville — (Montage by Broken Sidewalk)

Among the flashy renderings Detroit developer Village Green released of planned changes to the 800 City Tower Apartments was a dramatic view of the mid-century skyscraper with fireworks in the distance through the Louisville skyline. And we can only assume those were Thunder fireworks.

But how well do those renderings match up with reality? Now we know. In a recent Facebook post, the 800 City Tower shared views of Thunder taken from high up inside the tower. And we decided to mash them into the building’s renderings.

Of course, the rendered view features a vantage point higher than the tower’s top floor, but short of investing in a helicopter or drone, these mashups give us an idea of what the architects were going for with this view.

What do you think? How do the reality views compare to the rendered ones? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Warnock Street proposed to become University Boulevard—but who was Warnock?

By Branden Klayko -

Apr 27, 2016

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It’s no secret that the University of Louisville has been steadily remaking the streetscapes around its campus into something very university branded. There’s a lot of red, a lot of cardinal logos, and it’s quite unified. Now the University of Louisville Foundation is taking that transformation one step further with a proposal to change part of Warnock Street to University Boulevard. Which got us wondering, who was Warnock?

Well, it’s not entirely clear. The Warnock family did live in Kentucky, but it’s hard to trace down whether there were any Louisville Warnocks for any extended time. Most of the family was distributed throughout the state. It’s an old Scottish name and the family settled early in Kentucky, but there’s scant mention of them in the archives of the Courier-Journal.

An obituary for James Warnock of Greenup, Ky., dated May 18, 1904 in the C-J states solemnly and succinctly, “James Warnock, a pioneer and member of the largest family in this county, is dead at the age of 72 years. Winfield Warnock, his son, and Mrs. Rheena Holbrook, a daughter, have died in the past year.”

So what about the street that bears the Warnock name? It’s a relative newcomer, as it sat outside the city boundary until well past 1910. A 1905 Sanborn map makes no reference of the street while a survey done in 1910 shows the residential street in the St. Joseph neighborhood exists. To the west, where Warnock bends and today runs through the U of L Belknap Campus, was another street entirely. The 1905 map labels that stretch as East H Street.

Was Warnock just a distinctive name placed by a developer on a residential street in the early Louisville suburbs or is there more to the story? If you’ve got any additional information, please share it in the comments below.

The proposed University Boulevard. (Courtesy UofL Foundation)

Now back to the current proposal to rename Warnock. The foundation’s proposal is really to rename parts of three streets running through its campus—Warnock, Brook, and Iowa streets—but up for discussion is just the Warnock segment between Brook Street and Crittenden Drive.

According to documents the foundation filed with the city, the future University Boulevard would follow the alignment of Warnock before awkwardly turning 90 degrees at Brook. It then wraps around the future site of UofL’s planned research park, rising and dipping to avoid railroad tracks that cut the area into oddly sized parcels, before meeting up again at Iowa Street.

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Given that the research park turns its back to the neighborhood in the fashion of a suburban office park, the branding of the thoroughfare as University Boulevard should help reinforce the area as a campus enclave distinct from the surrounding city.

Kathleen Smith, chief of staff to the president of the U of L Foundation, made the case for the renaming in a letter to Metro Louisville. “These are exciting times at the University of Louisville with the transformation of the Warnock corridor into the main entrance to the University,” Smith wrote. “With this change, the University needs better recognition of this threshold to to UofL.”

Warnock Street leading into the University of Louisville. (Branden Klayko / Broken Sidewalk)

The university maintains that the Warnock entrance is the primary entrance for motorists coming off Interstate 65 and that the renaming will make it more obvious to drivers that they have arrived at the university.

If you’re interested in weighing in or learning more, tomorrow, April 28, the Land Development & Transportation Committee will take up the street renaming proposal at 1:00p.m. at the Old Jail Building, 514 West Liberty Street. It’s unlikely that the foundation’s request will be denied.

Interior Secretary: Stronger conservation needed to protect parks and wildlife refuges

Preservation

By Branden Klayko -

Apr 26, 2016

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Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said last week that major changes need to be made to protect public land threatened by natural, man-made and political threats, Timothy Cama reports for The Hill.

Jewell said in a speech, “If we stay on this trajectory, 100 years from now, national parks and wildlife refuges will be like postage stamps of nature on a map, isolated islands of conservation with run-down facilities that crowds of Americans visit like zoos to catch a glimpse of our nation’s remaining wildlife and undeveloped patches of land. That can’t and won’t happen. But as a country, we need to make a major course correction in how we approach conservation to ensure a bright future for our public lands and waters.”

The Secretary said that there is an “emergence of an extreme movement to seize public lands, from Oregon to Puerto Rico, putting lands that belong to all Americans at risk of being sold off for a short-term gain to the highest bidder. This movement has propped up dangerous voices that reject the rule of law, put communities and hard-working public servants at risk and fail to appreciate how deeply democratic and American our national parks and public lands are.”

As part of her plan to increase attendance at parks and refuges, she said focus needs to be directed at diverse new audiences, such as minorities and millennials, Cama writes. “She also wants better holistic planning around the wildlife and ecological needs of wild lands. Jewell called for new funding from Congress for public lands and parks, including fully funding the Land and Water Conservation Fund to $900 million every year.”

Energy Information Administration: Coal production falling faster than expected

Health

By Branden Klayko -

Apr 26, 2016

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“Coal production in the U.S. is falling, faster than expected and long before the U.S. Clean Power Plan, which was stayed by the Supreme Court, has come into effect,” Chris Mooney reports for the Washington Post. A report from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) found that coal production in March was down 4 percent from February and 36 percent lower than the previous March. Production is expected to decrease 16 percent in 2016, the largest annual decline since 1958. It is expected to decline by 14 percent in Appalachia and 20 percent in the West.

The U.S. produced one billion tons of coal in 2014, “the large majority of which was consumed to generate electricity right here at home,” Mooney reports. “In 2015 that dipped to 895.4 million short tons, a drop of more than 100 million tons in just one year. The drop, incidentally, was considerably more than EIA itself had forecast around this time a year ago, when the agency had expected a decline to 926 million tons.”

Timothy Hess, an analyst with the EIA’s Short Term Energy Outlook (STEO), told the Post: “The major contributor of lower coal production in the most recent STEO compared with a year ago is the increase in natural gas used in the electric-power sector, mainly because of lower natural-gas prices. In the April 2015 STEO, EIA forecast natural gas price at Henry Hub [the standard measuring point for U.S. gas] to average $3.45/million British thermal units in 2016. In the April 2016 STEO, EIA forecast the natural gas price at Henry Hub to average $2.18/mBtu in 2016. This drop in forecast price makes it more economic to run gas-fired generating units and reduced generation at some coal-fired units. The reduction in coal used for electric generation contributes to lower coal production.”

[Editor’s Note: This article has been cross-published from the Rural Blog. Top image by Kentucky Photo File / Flickr.]

Tour the Portland warehouse where Heine Bros. is moving its headquarters

By Branden Klayko -

Apr 26, 2016

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On April 18, Heine Bros. Coffee revealed plans to locate its headquarters in a historic industrial building on the edge of the Portland neighborhood. We toured the enormous building at 13th Street and West Main Street with Gregg Rochman of Shine Contracting, the group behind the structure’s renovation, to get a look at what’s in store.

The first thing you realize when you walk into 1301 West Main Street is its sheer size. The floor plates here are an acre, according to Rochman, and with light flooding in from oversized windows and clerestories, it certainly feels every square foot of that. The two-story, 80,000 square foot structure will eventually have multiple tenants—think hip offices, breweries, and studios—which will make it into an active hub and prominent visual gateway to Portland.

Inside, Rochman walked through the southern half of the building where the coffee company is taking 16,000 square feet. He pointed to a loading dock on the southwest side where he said green coffee beans will be loaded into the facility and stored in a humidity-controlled environment. From there, beans move through the enormous factory floor where they’re roasted and stored before being shipped out to Heine Bros.’s 13 area retail locations. A training facility is also planned where new hires can learn about the roasting process and how to make specialty coffee drinks.

Along the south facade, a row of existing offices faced with large windows will be completely transformed and expanded into the company’s corporate headquarters. Currently, Heine Bros.’s corporate offices are located above its Crescent Hill outpost and it operates a small warehouse in the Clifton neighborhood.

The overall renovation is being handled by Louisville-based Pickett Passafiume Architects, and Louisville interior design firm studio threesixty will work with Heine Bros. on its new space.

The structure was built in 1927 of concrete, brick, and steel with limestone detailing on the facade. “It’s just gorgeous,” Rochman said. “We drive west on Main Street to get to the rest of Portland practically every day.” The building’s stout but sturdy appearance, with a slightly elevated ground floor, gives it a prominent gateway feel along West Main.

“It was in really good shape compared to the stuff I’m used to dealing with,” Rochman said. “There’s some cleanup that we’ll need to do, but in general the building is in exceptionally good shape.”

The structure was previously home to Universal Installations, an HVAC supplier and contractor for the Home Depot. “They were owner–occupier,” Rochman said. “Richard Ciresi and Bonnie Ciresi, his wife, have owned the building for the last 17 years. They also have a love for beautiful old buildings so they have done a decent job of keeping it up and really paying attention to what it has to offer. They’re thrilled that we took it over because they know we’re going to take good care of it.”

There’s still some restoration work to be done. “When we purchased it, there was clearly some deferred maintenance on the [hardwood] floor,” Rochman said. “Unfortunately, some folks that had used the building in the past had run forklifts over this tongue-and-groove maple, rolled it, and ruined significant portions of it. But compared to an acre, most of it is in good shape.”

Shine Contracting has been removing damaged portions of the wood floor and salvaging and what it can for reuse inside the structure. “We’re pulling up this maple, carving out all the rot, and anything we can save we’re de-nailing and preparing for reuse, Rochman said. Rectangular patches of plywood and piles of wood indicate where that restoration work has been going on inside the warehouse space.

The remaining 24,000 square feet on the ground floor is still up for grabs. “We are courting people—and people are courting us—to use the rest of the space,” Rochman said. “There are breweries interested, there are a couple of them we’ve spoken to and there’s one more that’s interested in looking. There are a few different business uses—the high-tech want the rustic, cool, hip office feel. A potential manufacturer of recording devices. A sort of upscale flea type operation—not Flea Off Market, but not completely different than that. Those are types of uses that show real interest—people I have spoken to multiple times.”

And then there’s the basement, which is not your typical basement. Because the ground floor is lifted up (Rochman speculated the design was to keep the structure out of the flood plain), large windows allow light to pour into the southern part of the subgrade level. Most recently, the space has been used for parking. “That’s not the highest and best use for it, particularly along the exterior walls because you do have light coming in,” Rochman said. “We’re going to take it one step at a time to see who shows interest.”

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When complete, the structure will really help to pull people westward, under a train trestle into Portland proper, where plenty more activity is going on. It will also help to anchor, along with the Peerless Distilling Company at 10th Street, a forgotten slice of city north of Main Street where an expanded Waterfront Park is slated. And it’s just the beginning of creating a warehouse district in the area’s potential-rich stock of large buildings.