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Let the water flow: City should seize chance to 'daylight'millrace -The Register-Guard, E... Page 2 of 2 planners must be careful to keep the millrace in scale and integrate it into the overall design. The end result should be to enhance, not limit, the private development needed to produce tax revenue. Make the millrace an amenity, not, as City Councilor Scott Meisner warned last year, a "theme park." The preliminary cost estimate for the millrace project is $20 million, an amount that will require congressional assistance and a possible combination of city stormwater and transportation funding, perhaps even a modest bond measure. Critics will no doubt point out that the ideal time for tackling such a project is when the local economy is booming and public agencies have the budgets and bullish outlooks conducive to making such bold, visionary - and expensive - choices. The economy is showing early signs of recovery. But the last couple of years have taken a severe toll on the downtown and on local governments. Yet it's essential that the City Council not allow temporary economic circumstances to force it into making cramped, shortsighted design decisions that would be regretted in the years to come. Leaving the millrace buried would deprive future generations of the benefits that flow out of visionary leadership. As City Councilor David Kelly noted at Monday's meeting: "One of the `.• things this body ought to be in the business of, occasionally, is dreaming big. And this is a big dream." If a fiscally myopic decision is made to leave the millrace buried, the opportunity to revive the waterway - and to create an amenity connecting the courthouse district to the river - may never come again, at least not in our lifetimes. a C http://www.registerguard.com/cgi-bin/printStory.py?name=ed.edit.mi llrace.phn.1 1 12&date=... 11/12/03