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NEWS | SAN DIEGO

Price tag for Horton Plaza improvements gets OK from Civic San Diego

By JAMES PALEN, The Daily Transcript

Thursday, October 18, 2012

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At its board meeting Wednesday, Civic San Diego, the new organization formed by the merger of the Centre City Development Corp. and the Southeastern Development Corp., approved expenditures for building the roughly $14.6 million Horton Plaza Improvement Project, setting a timeline for the downtown project with an expected groundbreaking later this year.

Originally budgeted in January 2011 for about $9.9 million in hard construction and design costs, the project design underwent an array of changes through 2011 and 2012 as public input shaped how it would look and items once thought unlikely to be included, such as an interactive fountain, were drawn into and accepted into final drawings.

A groundbreaking has been scheduled for Nov. 29, but the City Council still needs to give final approval of the funding. By demolishing the former Robinsons-May department store building south of the current Horton Plaza Park, there will be room for the planned plaza and amphitheater, which will include the interactive water feature, architectural luminaria, public restrooms, granite paving, three pavilion kiosks for retail space and underground storage.

The project will also restore Horton Plaza Park to its historic grassy look and a design closer to its original, both of which were changed over time through redevelopment, such as the building of the adjacent shopping mall. The iconic fountain at its center, designed by Irving Gill, will also be restored. The project design was initially approved in September 2011 by the Centre City Development Corp., which, as Civic San Diego does now for certain development projects, implemented downtown redevelopment on behalf of the city.

That approval, CCDC said at the time, set the project in the safe zone ahead of the potential dissolution of redevelopment in the state, which did eventually happen and became effective early this year.

The city’s successor agency to redevelopment, essentially the City Council, may have to convince the successor agency oversight board that the funds needed for the project beyond the original budget should be included in the successor agency’s obligated payment schedule.

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