Letter to the Editor: City misses tax revenue opportunity with Park Central Square as park

My thought is to stop beating a dead horse in redeveloping Park Central Square every 30 years or so. I am a native Springfieldian. Four sides of my family trace back to 1837 in Greene County. … I am a licensed architect, registered interior designer, and a licensed real estate broker, specializing in commercial and industrial real estate. In my 56 years here, I have seen numerous attempts to clean up the square, make it presentable and find a better purpose for it. No ideas have seemed to be successful or particularly notable. Each time, there have been numerous security issues that create tensions. While in the present form as a primarily hard-surface park, there continue to be numerous security issues. 

Historically, the square was the center of the city and normally was the location of the city hall or the county courthouse/offices. Our square is not sufficient in size, in comparison to other smaller Ozarks’ communities, to merit any real recognition with a city hall or county courthouse situated in the center. Most also would have perimeter parking to serve the center function and any retail/office needs on the square. Our city hall and county courthouse were wisely and intentionally moved out of our square area many years ago to provide greater accessibility. … We seem to continue to search for reasons to maintain a square. My suggestion is to do a professional study of the annual costs to maintain and provide security services for the “Park Central” area, in its present form as a park, and the costs to modify the site back to a site level automobile parking situation and necessary security. I suspect it is much more than you would expect. These seem to be two of the directions we are being pushed. No one seems to be entertained by homeless runaways bathing in the fountains or even more objectionable things occurring. Basically it says, “Let’s just put a new face on things and live with the inherent problems.”

When Gene Boles was director of the Springfield Planning Department a number of years ago, he and I were discussing this very topic. He had left the Oklahoma City planning department to move to Springfield to provide a fresh direction to our department here. Oklahoma City had experienced the (square) deterioration most other communities had at that time. The planning staff had quietly done a “highest and best use” appraisal for its square and discovered the most productive use, at that time, was to demolish all of the buildings and start over again as cornfields. Of course, they found that fact disconcerting and did not publish their findings.

An independent, professionally executed, highest and best use real estate appraisal needs to be done, to evaluate from a dispassionate tax benefit viewpoint, to determine what the real economic best use for our square might be. With two new parking garages being completed soon immediately to the west and an existing one just southeast, providing only site-level automobile parking on this extremely valuable real estate seems like an economic waste.

My suspicion is the best thing would be to sell the property (with some greenspace restrictions) and allow it to be a contributing part of our tax base. Considering all of the existing buildings that are being redeveloped, the new construction going on with the College Station project, and the rehab of the existing Heer’s building, I suspect there would be considerable interest from any large developer, in building a large multistory mixed-use project, dead center, in our minisquare. We might even then find a way to tie all of the second-floor spaces of the square’s perimeter buildings to this new building and make them more desirable space. We could even allow parking and vehicular circulation on the site level below this new structure. There are many things that may be done with this approach. 

The positive result is it would finally lay to rest the ongoing cycle of “What can we do with the square to make it a safe and better place?”

—Ben L.E. Webb, Webb and Associates LLC