Since creating the Broadway Underpass murals, and the book of Downtown memories called Snapped on the Street, I’ve been a huge booster of Downtown Tucson. Any great city needs a vibrant heart; a truly public place where we can all come together to celebrate, protest, shop, eat, see a show, and just be. All of us for all over the city from all different backgrounds.

The night we dedicated the murals, we built a stage into half of Broadway, had classic car shows, and swing bands played all night as 20,000 people of all ages, ethnicities, and economic background danced together in the streets. All the shops & restaurants were open and packed with customers. It was an experience never to forget, a view of what can be.

I’ve been a member of the board of directors of the Tucson Downtown Alliance for the past five years, and currently serve as the Board Secretary. I have been intimately involved in Downtown issues every step of the way, and have been a fervent supporter of the Rio Nuevo project since its beginning.

But I have my concerns with the way this process is being carried out.

The City staff is working hard to manage the money that is being raised by the Rio Nuevo tax-increment financing district, and they are making some good management decisions. The UA Science Center, for one, will be a very exciting museum that promises to draw people from all over the city and the world.

But there has been too much of a tendency to spend a ton of money on a few big projects that are controlled and managed by the City without input from or collaboration with the business owners and resident who are downtown right now.

Richard and Shana Oseran’s Hotel Congress is one of the most precious treasures Tucson has to offer, and shows exactly what needs to be done to revitalize the entire downtown–a perfect mix of history, culture, tradition, and hipness, created with passion and brilliance. We must learn from their example.

And we need to listen to people like the Oserans and give them the infrastructure they need to make Downtown work, whether that is adequate parking, or frontloading money to build the trolley/streetcar project from UMC to Rio Nuevo running every ten minutes.

We need to be entrepreneurial. We need to get the right people involved downtown, and get out of their way as they create the vision. A hundred different visionaries creating a diverse, exciting location where we will all want to be is infinitely preferable to a few big-box style “attractions” with nothing in between to bring people through the whole downtown, exploring the nooks & crannies and finding their own Downtown along the way.

There are many different projects that could make a huge difference Downtown right now, that don’t require a lot of money. Even a few thousand dollars in the right place at the right time can mean all the difference to the success of a whole block. There are projected to be more than $120 million in the district funding for investment in projects. A $5 million rotating fund for small no-interest loans to small projects could be the difference between a downtown that works and yet another costly failure.

And we need to commit to the entire community that Downtown Revitalization is not Urban Renewal Part 2. To the contrary, the Rio Nuevo project is a unique opportunity to heal some of the still-open wounds left by our destruction of the historic center of our city in the 1960s and 1970s.

We should create a Congress Street historic district and stop the bulldozers from destroying any more historic buildings in our Downtown.

We should look to re-create the original Plaza San Agustin as part of the new Civic Plaza project, and we should look to the longtime residents of Barrio Viejo for guidance on how we can most effectively achieve that goal.

We should create parks and facilities for people who live downtown to use every day, not simply for people who visit once or twice a year. Downtown is everybody’s neighborhood, but it is also somebody’s neighborhood.

We should make sure that ALL one-way streets downtown are converted to two-way and that Congress and Broadway are changed from freeway on-ramps into pedestrian-friendly hubs of activity.

Downtown has always been our heart, and now is our opportunity to treat it (and treat us!) with the respect it deserves. When I am a councilmember, Downtown will be in good hands.