Politics

Funding for Waterfront Vision Cobbled Together

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published July 7, 2009 at 3:27 PM PDT

This story was published more than 15 years ago.

Funding for Waterfront Vision Cobbled Together

The San Diego Port District has cobbled together financing for the first phase of the North Embarcadero Visionary Plan -- a new waterfront esplanade on San Diego Bay.

The San Diego Port District has cobbled together financing for the first phase of the North Embarcadero Visionary Plan – a new waterfront esplanade on San Diego Bay.

The plan will create a wide pedestrian walkway along the bay near the Star of India, lined by jacarandas and palm trees. Harbor Drive will be narrowed, public rest rooms added. Dreams of beautifying the Embarcadero have been in the works for over a decade.

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Waterfront activists were disappointed the original drawings of a ten acre public park at the foot of Broadway, complete with a children’s fountain, will instead be a plaza where trucks load and unload supplies for cruise ships.

But Port Chair Steve Cushman characterizes the vote as a great gift for the region.

“I’m puzzled frankly, by those who think they’ve lost a park, because I didn’t know we had a park," he says. "What we had is a four-lane busy street, and here we’re going to have a 100-foot esplanade. I don’t know why that isn’t a wonderful amenity for all. This will be a beautiful esplanade.”

The Port doesn’t actually have the money to build even the modified plan, because the Lane Field hotel development, slated to cover the costs, is on hold due to the poor economy. So the City of San Diego’s redevelopment agency, CCDC, will lend the Port $8 million of the $14 million it needs to get started on what’s been called “San Diego’s front porch.”

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.