COCHRANTON —
The Cochranton Area Public Library Board of Trustees is moving forward with the bidding process regarding the new library’s future construction and plans to meet with and possibly interview the four contractors who submitted bids.

The trustees met with David Walter, senior vice president for New York-based architectural firm Clark Patterson Lee, during a special meeting Wednesday night to discuss Phase 1 options and gain insight as to what potential cost-saving changes can be negotiated within an approximate 180-day period in which the bids will remain valid for selection.

“There’s two ways to make that happen,” Walter suggested. “Come up with a list of changes for each of the four contractors to review or pick one and negotiate prior to signing a contract.”

Any cosmetic, non-structural aspects of the project are negotiable with the bidders at this point with the trustees reserving the right to any final say, he added, as long as they don’t affect the health and safety of future occupants.

The board agreed to organize a small committee within the coming weeks to write up questions for each of the contractors in preparation for potential individual meetings.

“We can give them suggestions for changes up front and they can prepare answers,” said Brenda Wait, trustee.

Even if a decision is made, groundbreaking isn’t likely to occur until spring, perhaps late April or early May, according to Mark Roche, project adviser to the trustees.

The project may take approximately nine months to finish, he estimated.

In the meantime, Clark Patterson Lee agents can look over project designs and submit any ideas for potential savings and even send a representative to assist with the interviews, Walter said.

Approximate main bids received include $570,233.35 from Roche Builders, $526,858 from Hill Construction, $591,086 from Norbert B. Miller Construction and $514,000 from Bernarding’s Builders, all based in Cochranton.

Ideally, the board of trustees would like to see project costs trimmed back to their previously budgeted figures of about $480,000, based on existing funds and amounts the board believes can be raised prior to payment arrangements through library functions or patronage, according to Roche.

“There are issues in (the project manual) I think we can work out,” he said, mentioning some of the current designs may be considered over-engineered when lined up with available funds. “I’m thinking we can engineer it down to $480,000 or close.”

The bottom line, trustees agreed, is that the final budget is the final budget.

“You can’t get blood from a stone,” said Joan Kardos, treasurer, placing some responsibility for higher costs on the architectural designs, some of which have been altered, including the roof shape, potential attic space and pillar structures. “Without those changes, we’d be close to $800,000.”

Architectural concerns raised by trustees included smaller porch space, which may require compensation through landscaping, and possibly larger sidewalk space for activities or general usability.

The four bids included alternate costs for additional features, including a lift mechanism for cleaning and bulb replacement of a large foyer light and exterior pole-mounted light sighting and wiring installation.

These costs, as well as alternate costs for performance and payment bonds regarding material and labor may be dropped, according to trustees, who confirmed the willingness of each contractor to look at potential cost savings and work toward the project’s affordability.

“These things always come in over budget,” Roche said, “but there’s always a way to bring the cost down.”

Phase 1 bids do not include cabinetry, shelving or any Phase 2 work, which includes demolition of the current building, parking lot paving and landscaping, Kramer said.

While official library parking will not be available until after the current building’s demolition, adjacent lot parking and some on-street parking will be available in the meantime, Kardos said.

ANOTHER day, another snowstorm here in the United States of Antarctica. But in a growing number of neighbourhoods, everyone from safer-city activists to transportation engineers is watching how vehicles negotiate all that snow, and wondering if what they see might result in streets that are less dangerous for everyone.

For years, city planners have used curb extensions at junctions to slow vehicles as they make turns and give pedestrians a shorter span of road to cross—as well as somewhere safer to stand while they wait to do so. Known as “neckdowns”, these curb extensions also increase visibility, again improving safety. But working out where best to build neckdowns usually involves costly, time-consuming traffic-calming studies and computer modelling that cash-strapped local authorities can ill afford.

Cheaper, perhaps, to let it snow.

“Snow,” says Clarence Eckerson Jr., founder of Streetfilms, a New York non-profit that makes short films about urban transportation, “is nature’s tracing paper.” After a snowstorm, a number of patterns are traced across the gradually clearing surfaces. Rather than using up the entire breadth of the road, vehicles tend to take the slowest, most safely navigated route around the corners of a slippery intersection. When snow-ploughs clear roads, they leave large piles at roadsides and junctions, which vehicles must drive around. Finally, pedestrians also tread their own optimal paths through the snow. The result is the type of snowy neckdown, or “sneckdown”, shown in the photo.

Aaron Naparstek, a visiting scholar at MIT’s department of urban studies and planning, coined the term “sneckdown” this January when he was looking for a Twitter hashtag for the phenomenon. Since then, hundreds of photos of #sneckdowns have been posted. “Urban public space is an incredibly valuable and limited commodity, so why do we give up so much of it to its most inefficient user—the single-person vehicle?” he asks.

A growing number of urban thinkers and planners believe that sneckdowns offer a natural guide to where permanent neckdowns and traffic islands could be built. Earlier this week, for instance, the Office of Transportation Planning in Raleigh, North Carolina, tweeted “Since we know the snow is coming, send us your pictures of wasted space at intersections in Raleigh.”

Gary Toth, a long-term engineer for the New Jersey Department of Transportation who now works for New York’s Project for Public Spaces, says people have lost patience with the glacially slow pace of traditional street design and improvement. Sneckdowns, he notes, “let you watch real-time human behaviour rather than using computer models to predict it—models that often get it wrong.” He believes that “lighter, quicker, cheaper” is the way forward in urban street planning. Sometimes that means using temporary neckdowns, barrels or painted bike lanes to see what works. Sometimes it means waiting for snow.

Like all new ideas, this one has its forebears. As far back as the 1980s, road planners in Australia were covering intersections with flour, waiting a few hours, then climbing the nearest high building and photographing the paths vehicles had taken. The results were used to improve junction layouts. And at San Jose State University in California, among others, some footpaths were laid only after planners studied shortcuts taken by students rushing to class—the optimal routes known as “desire paths”.

Sneckdowns offer only a rough guide to how urban streets can be made safer admits Mr Eckerston. Before building permanent neckdowns or traffic islands, he notes, you have to consider numerous factors, such as the ability of emergency and sanitation vehicles to negotiate newly narrowed junctions. If parking spaces are lost, the impact on nearby businesses has to be considered too.

Mr Naparstek notes that some areas of snowy streets left untouched by vehicles are so large, they could be used as entirely new public plazas, with landscaping, chairs and tables—something that has already been done in parts of New York city. He has a hashtag for that, too: #plowza. 

As green initiatives increase in popularity, the city of Austin maintains a complex relationship with urban agriculture. Many urban farm advocates viewed the controversial update to the urban farm code – which failed to include a proposed provision allowing for the processing of animals in single-family zoning – as a step back from sustainability. Then there are the new plans for Austin’s first indoor farmers’ market – planned for 1100 East Fifth Street and facilitated by a potential $333,829 city loan to development group 11E5 LLC – which have left at least some local farmers wondering if the city cares more for developers than producers. However, as farmers navigate the changing landscape, community organizers and grassroots activists are rallying around a new wave of guerrilla gardening – a food forest – in hopes of cultivating community growth and empowerment while increasing access to healthy food.

Modeled after the Beacon Food Forest in Seattle, the proposed East Feast Festival Beach Food Forest pilot project is slated for the south side of the Festival Beach Com­mun­ity Garden, just east of I-35 at Waller Avenue and Clermont Street on the north shore of Lady Bird Lake. Roughly 2.15 acres of land would be reimagined into an edible landscape, complete with fruit trees, a butterfly garden, kids’ play structures, and a stormwater wetland filtration system, in addition to other features. Though hardly a new concept – there’s a 2,000-year-old food forest in the Moroccan desert – a food forest will certainly be new to Austin, providing an additional layer of sustainable food production.

The idea took shape in the fall of 2012 as a result of community conversations initiated by the Parks and Recreation Depart­ment as part of the 90-acre Holly Shores/Edward Rendon Sr. Park at Festival Beach Master Plan. Holly neighborhood resident Elizabeth Walsh, concerned that the needs of the neighborhood were not being addressed, attended public meetings and began having conversations with her neighbors about the plans for the area. Residents indicated a strong interest in passive, edible landscaping.

A Palatable Landscape

For Walsh, one of the greatest joys of the food forest project has been seeing the way it inspires such a diverse range of people, from neighborhood seniors to environmental justice advocates looking for ways to expand food access. The East Feast Coalition came to fruition in November 2012 when 20 people representing different parts of an emerging sustainable food system in East Austin gathered in Walsh’s backyard. These groups included the Festival Beach Community Garden, the East Side Compost Pedallers, Urban Patchwork, HOPE Farmers Market, and Sustainable Food Center, among other groups and individual community members. Once established, the coalition began working with PARD to include edible landscaping in the master plan. As a result, “Community access to healthy foods through sustainable community agriculture” appears as one of the top nine priorities in the proposed final plan; specifically, the recommendation calls for sustainable edible landscaping near the Festival Beach Community Garden.

In preparation for the food forest, the city’s Community Transformation Mini-Grant through the Sus­tain­able Urban Agriculture Community Gardens Program supported a series of public outreach and engagement sessions last summer. The first three were Bus-Stop Garden Parties where organizers and attendees gathered to build wicking bed gardens and bus benches for the 21/22 bus line near Metz Elementary. The sessions culminated in an Aug. 11, 2013, design workshop attended by more than 50 community members at the nearby Rebekah Baines Johnson Center, an independent living facility run by nonprofit Austin Geriatric Center; the food forest will join the Festival Beach Com­munity Garden in complementing and supporting the RBJ food pantry. Landscape architect Mitchell Wright, along with perma­cul­ture designer Chris Sanchez created the final plan for the forest; the entire collection of ideas from the meeting were arranged within the plan. Wright is working pro bono on the project. “It was a beautiful challenge for me to assemble the master plan with so many wonderful, spirited ideas,” he says. “I was just the fortunate one that got the opportunity to draw it up.” Next steps for the site include soil testing and completion of the permitting process. East Feast is aiming for an April dig-in date.

Though often perceived as a more feral form of a community garden, a food forest is actually highly organized, made up of tiers or families of plants with a symbiotic relationship, naturally contributing to a healthier, more productive ecosystem. These tiers, referred to as guilds, are integral to the overall health of the food forest as each component (soil, microbes, insects, birds, etc.) is essential. If done correctly, a food forest should be self-sustaining without the use of fungicides, pesticides, or herbicides.

Though the specifics are not nailed down, the idea is that people will have open access to what is grown on the site. Aided by educational signage to help people know what is available to eat and when, the concept is, more or less, “take what you will eat today.” The community-supported forest is expected to be dense enough and to flourish sufficiently to provide food products on a regular basis. According to Walsh, “Permaculture is more than gardening; it’s a philosophy, a style of living that is in harmony with the natural environment, a recipe book, and a medicine chest. Permaculture strives to re-create and/or augment natural patterns and systems that are already in place and predate us. It offers alternative economics of natural and social systems instead of imposing unnatural controls on our landscape that rely on artificial and often wasteful practices to sustain.”

Reconnecting With Food

The food forest is certainly ambitious, but with an almost 50-person waitlist for the Festival Beach Community Garden, the idea has thus far received widespread community support. Unlike the city’s recent updates to the urban farm code, which polarized a community, most people seem to agree that innovative agriculture in public spaces is a good thing. One of the most outspoken groups against the proposed urban farm code, PODER, or People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources, endorses the food forest effort. In a letter of support, PODER board chair Janie Rangel writes, “Since the Holly Shores public process began, many neighborhood residents have been working with a growing movement to develop the food forest concept. Our public land can support much more public produce. Edible landscaping can help people reconnect with the source of their food.”

If all goes well, the pilot forest will eventually expand, using underutilized spaces for edible landscaping and other beautification projects. “As we learn from our pilot project, we anticipate that there will be many opportunities to expand the food forest, or food forest patches, throughout the rich soil and wonderful parkland north and south of Lady Bird Lake,” Wright says. “We have heard an overwhelming consensus among neighbors and stakeholders that we hope to preserve the natural beauty and tranquility of this treasured parkland.”

The master plan was initially on the agenda for a Jan. 30 vote, but City Council postponed action until Feb. 27 to allow time for more community outreach. Though the forest is just one component of the larger plan, the Council meeting will include an opportunity for public comment, and East Feasters are asking those who support the food forest to tell Council why it is essential to the area. Says Walsh, “There are many reasons to grow food in the city: food security, food justice, building healthy communities, recreation, building skills, saving seed, providing wildlife habitat … As the cost of living and populations rise, making the most use of available land to produce more food locally will become increasingly important.”

Fundraising is also a priority, and East Feasters are currently scouting crowd-sourced fundraising campaigns and business partnerships. Eric Goff, co-founder of East Side Compost Pedallers, has already pledged his support to the project. “The food forest is a visionary educational opportunity that aligns beautifully with our mission to increase soil fertility and access to healthy food in Austin. As a show of support, the Compost Pedallers will be donating as much compost as we can to help get the project started,” he says.

While a food forest won’t take the place of better jobs for decent pay, like plant guilds whose cooperative work helps build a productive microecosystem, East Feast is certainly a step in the right direction. Says Wright, “Remember that this project is not just about food but about building relationships in the community; these go hand in hand – brothers and sisters finding common ground in fresh food abundance.”