New museum might work on the Foss, if . . .

The News Tribune

The Children's Museum is one of the South Sound's treasures. So are the public spaces along Tacoma's Foss Waterway.

Can the museum be squeezed into one of those spaces without shortchanging the public?

That's the question surrounding the downtown museum's bid to relocate to a 25,000-square-foot building it wants to create at the head of the Foss Waterway.

The museum, an educational center for young children and their parents, would be an excellent match for the city's waterfront – especially in a site surrounded by a park, as the proposed location would be. Visiting families would not be strictly confined indoors, and the busy waterway offers opportunities for children to learn about maritime activities.

The problem is that the two-acre site it has targeted – now owned by the Foss Waterway Development Authority – was secured as open space with $660,000 from Pierce County's Conservation Futures fund.

This fund is dedicated to protecting key properties from commercial and otherdevelopment. Various groups – Citizens for a Healthy Bay, Metro Parks and rowing enthusiasts, among others – lobbied to have the county use Conservation Futures money to permanently set aside the land in question as a park.

Some of them are upset about the Children's Museum's proposal. A museum, obviously, is not a park.

Still, a solution might be possible. A family-friendly museum is not necessarily incompatible with the kind of open space characteristic of an urban setting.

The site in question consists of roughly 90,000 square feet of dry ground (not counting tidelands). A 25,000 square-foot museum on two floors would leave a lot of area open. The museum could be seen as an enhancement of a park that would remain accessible for boating and other uses.

But – and this is a big but – the area occupied by the museum's footprint would have to be offset by securing property of the same quality and convenience somewhere else on the Foss waterfront.

Nor is that enough. The Conservation Futures program would be undermined if it looks as if landowners were being allowed to renege on the conditions of preservation.

To avoid that perception, any plan that permits the Children's Museum on that site would have to satisfy those who got the site protected in the first place.

There's probably room here for a win-win solution. But no net loss of attractive and open public waterfront property has to be the bottom line.

The News Tribune
1950 South State Street, Tacoma, Washington 98405
253-597-8742
© Copyright 2007 Tacoma News, Inc. A subsidiary of The McClatchy

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