Anywhere But Here

The fate of Kansas City’s most precious real estate lies in the hands of a polka band. Fortunately, it’s not just any polka band. Brave Combo takes the old oom-pa-pa and mixes it with everything from sexy salsa to über-cool Japanese pop, a postmodern melange that sounds great when a listener is bubbly with beer.

And this Friday, when Brave Combo is scheduled to jump onto a temporary stage in a little-known park on the banks of the Missouri River, there’ll be plenty of beer to slosh. The band is the marquee attraction of Kansas City’s first “Oktoberfest on the Wasserfront,” a three-day festival packed with bouncy music, jugglers, stilt walkers, organ grinders, fire-eaters, mimes, wieners and sauerkraut, along with gallons of balmy suds.

But don’t be fooled by all the fun. This Oktoberfest is serious business. The polkateers’ mission: help bring back Kansas City’s long-neglected riverfront.

The city agency in charge of economic development along the river hopes that this weekend’s partiers, between belches, will look around and notice where they are. This is, after all, the place where the earliest Kansas Citians unpacked their canoes, hung their shingles and multiplied across the bluffs and gullies to the south.

Pro-business-bureaucrats-turned-beer-bash-promoters hope the revelers will also appreciate the sweeping view of the mighty river, the gritty iron bridges and the downtown skyscrapers gleaming in the evening light. It’s a view that makes Kansas City look like cooler towns that have developed their waterfronts. Nashville, Tennessee, for example. Or Davenport, Iowa.

“You gotta have a place that says, ‘This is Kansas City. Yeah. This is it,'” says Leonard Graham, president of one of the engineering firms that helped build the usually deserted park where Brave Combo is set to play.

In years past, this land has been a dump for towed cars. Now, thanks to legalized gambling, it’s home to a bucolic spread of trees and grass. But on most days, this slice of civic investment is as lifeless as the vacant lots surrounding the city’s sewage plants.

What other city in North America could own more than 50 acres of prime riverfront property but wind up with an empty park?

The Idea

The park’s evolution began fifteen years ago as a vision. Since then, that vision has been commandeered by the city’s Economic Development Corporation, a big-business-promotion agency that is partly funded by — and bows to the prevailing political whims of — City Hall. Not one but two world-class urban-design firms have helped shape that vision, and legalized gambling was supposed to help pay for it. Still, the city hasn’t been able to make it happen.

In 1987, a class of architecture students from the University of Kansas invited some of Kansas City’s power players to join them for punch and cookies and gaze upon a nifty mock-up of downtown they’d spent all semester creating.

On the southern edge of their miniature Missouri River, the students had erected the tour de force of imaginings: Spirit Park, a broad swath of grass and trees stretching west from the Paseo Bridge to the Heart of America Bridge.

The pretend park was flanked by a dazzling aquarium and a “horticultural center.” In the broad space between, they’d sprinkled fake trees and splotches of blue paint to represent cozy groves and pristine ponds. At its center, along the water’s edge, rose a stage overlooking a grassy amphitheater big enough to host an event as grand as the Boston Pops’ annual Fourth of July concert. Along the park’s southern edge were condos, office buildings, restaurants and shops filled with people.

The students envisioned Spirit Park as a public space for all Kansas Citians, a place to host the Spirit Festival and a slew of other events throughout the year.

Richard Berkley, Kansas City’s mayor at the time, was impressed. He invited the students’ teacher, an architect named Glen LeRoy, to join the board of the Port Authority, a public body whose board of directors is appointed by the mayor. The Economic Development Corporation provides workers to help the Port Authority board oversee development along the city’s riverfront.

LeRoy gladly obliged. “I’ve been something of a river rat for twenty years,” he says now. “We exist in Kansas City because of the river. So how can we turn our back on it?”

Showing up for Port Authority meetings, LeRoy found himself allied with two men who had strong political connections — among them George Blackwood, who would later become a councilman and mayor pro tem.

Few Kansas Citians had ever heard of the Port Authority. It had no substantial budget. Blackwood often joked about this, saying that as Port Authority chairman, he should have a boat, by God. So his colleagues gave him one — a plastic bobber barely big enough to sail in a bathtub. One night they passed a stodgy resolution officially naming the toy “George Blackwood’s Folly.”

But soon after LeRoy joined the Port Authority, he and his cohorts got serious about the waterfront.

Since 1946, they learned, Kansas City leaders had considered more than forty plans for resuscitating the barren waterfront. Most notable was a 1950s push to locate a football stadium on the land between the bridges. It would have had a retractable roof.

Instead, the city opted to drag construction debris to the site and leave it there. City workers then threw down some asphalt and opened a tow lot.

Blackwood, LeRoy and the rest of the Port Authority were determined to right these wrongs.

The Port Authority pooled what little money it had from state grants and attended national conferences, where they learned about riverfront development efforts in cities such as Omaha, Nebraska, and Charleston, South Carolina. Afterward, they would declare that what these communities were doing was “phenomenal.”

During one such conference in Washington, D.C., they paid visits to Senator Kit Bond and representatives from Senator John Danforth’s office, who helped them come up with ideas for nabbing some federal funds.

They also managed to win a state grant to hire an urban-design firm to turn the KU students’ class project into an actual development plan. Money in hand, the Port Authority employed a high-powered design firm, the New York-based Cooper Robertson and Associates.

The gem of Cooper Robertson’s impressive portfolio is Battery Park City, a stretch of skyscrapers and a tree-lined esplanade that wraps around the southeastern tip of Manhattan. Locally, Cooper Robertson had just finished the Nelson’s Henry Moore Sculpture Garden.

Unlike LeRoy’s imaginative architecture students, the Port Authority’s hired designers would need real money. So to pay for their big-ticket project, the Port Authority board members recast their blueprint for a great public space into a plan for a great commercial space.

As EDC Executive Director Brian Collins and Port Authority Director Bob Collins (who later became Kansas City’s city manager; he’s unrelated to Brian Collins) worked with Cooper Robertson, the drawings that began to emerge showed an area much denser than the wide-open Spirit Park. They erased more than half of the acres of meadows and ponds and baseball diamonds to make room for brick-and-glass buildings that would, they hoped, house a Fortune 500 company.

It seemed a decent compromise. The Cooper Robertson plan, completed in the summer of 1990, proposed a corporate campus as well as a park that would be a “gateway to the city.” It would host the Spirit Festival and a Fourth of July festival. It would include fountains, a marina, volleyball courts and a jogging trail.

“While the riverfront plan should be practical,” the New York designers wrote, “it should also be conceived of as a civic work of art.”

The Snobs

Near the end of the Berkley administration, in the early ’90s, Port Authority officials decided to start by building the park. They figured it would be easier to convince a big company to move in if they could show off a field of green grass and hopeful saplings rather than a heap of bent rebar and abandoned cars.

Though they were already paying a top design firm, they decided to bid out a new contract for fine-tuning the plans. The Port Authority had been criticized for doling out no-bid contracts, according to minutes of the early 1991 meeting at which the board members agreed to float their request for proposals. (At that same meeting, board members presented outgoing Chairman Blackwood with a handsome glass-and-wood case for his toy boat. A brass plaque on the case commemorated his service to the Port Authority. He still keeps the silly trophy by the window in his downtown law office.)

Cooper Robertson finished second in the bidding. The winner was a firm from Massachusetts called Sasaki & Associates. (The company would go on to design the celebrated Ilus Davis Park between City Hall and the federal courthouse; more recently, it completed a privately funded downtown-revitalization scheme known as the Sasaki Plan.

Still, it wasn’t a bad deal for Kansas Citians. Like Cooper Robertson, Sasaki had a killer portfolio. Beautifying waterfronts was one of its specialties.

The firm had designed the Waterfront Park in Boston, where people gathered for festivals, spread out blankets to listen to concerts, and strolled through a rose garden honoring one of the Kennedys.

Sasaki had also conjured a park for the people of Kuwait — it looks surreal, a circular, man-made peninsula jutting out into the Arabian Gulf, with a lagoon, a beach and a 400-seat amphitheater designed in a trippy style that suggests a Jetsons-rebuilt Mecca.

Perhaps of greatest interest to Kansas Citians was the fact that Sasaki had come up with a plan for the Charleston, South Carolina, waterfront. Upon completion, this civic improvement did something no other development in that southern city ever had: It poked a hole in the racial divide. “The diversity of park patrons has proved exceptional in this historically segregated city, where natives still set clear limits regarding whom they will associate with and where,” Landscape Architecture magazine observed in 1991.

In early summer 1992, Sasaki headed a team that included two celebrated Kansas City companies: Howell McKnight Associates, which had worked on the Penn Valley Park Master Plan and the Overland Park Downtown Plan; and Taliaferro & Browne, an engineering firm with a résumé that included the federal courthouse in Kansas City, Kansas, and the American Royal Complex.

The folks at Sasaki aren’t ashamed of their reputation for snobbery.

“I’ve known us to quit sometimes rather than bend to a bad idea,” says Sasaki partner Stuart Dawson, who was one of the lead designers of what was still being referred to as Spirit Park.

Dawson was thrilled by the opportunity to mold the Missouri River’s bank into something spectacular. As a boy, he had lived in Leavenworth and seen the 1950 flood. The power of the river had left an impression on him. As an adult, working as an urban designer, he had learned about Kansas City’s legendary parks.

“Kansas City has some of the most beautiful parks in the Midwest,” he says, “some absolutely beautiful parks. And this was to be one of them.”

The Port Authority would ultimately pay Sasaki more than $500,000 for its efforts.

In August 1992, Dean addressed board members’ concerns that, if the park were built before the office complex, it might seem isolated and be underused. But he was “confident” that if city officials maintained the park and planned enough activities there, they would be able to “attract people, not once, but several times.”

He wanted to make sure the park had “a sense of completeness” after the city spent a proposed $5 million to build it. To achieve this, he and his team loaded their design with amenities to lure visitors. Most spectacular was a pair of fountains designed in a fish motif. “They were to have been in the tradition of the great fountain on the Plaza,” Dawson says. “Really quite monumental. On scale with the great Missouri River.”

Stairways and a boat ramp would reach the river’s edge. Overlooks would stretch across the levy and tower above the swift-moving current. A new viaduct would extend Grand Avenue down into the area. Dawson and his partners would spruce up the place with gardens, a stage, concession stands and drinking fountains. And benches everywhere would let people sit for hours and gaze upon the mighty river.

It appeared that the Port Authority would soon be rolling in money.

In early 1993, the Port Authority began negotiating on behalf of the city with several casino companies that were eager to cash in on Missouri’s new laws permitting riverboat gambling.

With its riverfront land, the city stood to reap massive amounts of gambling revenue. And it could broker a lucrative rent deal to pay for the park.

“The plans for riverfront development, which heretofore had been a dream, suddenly began to look like ‘Holy moly, we can do this thing,'” recalls Leonard Graham of Taliaferro & Browne, one of Sasaki’s subcontractors.

Oddly, though, the closer the Port Authority moved toward inking a deal with the rich gambling interests, the farther the highbrow designers at Sasaki moved out of the picture.

“All of a sudden, these gambling interests started to take over, and we just sort of disappeared,” Dawson recalls. “I don’t remember any specific fight. They just moved away from the original plans in favor of whatever was happening behind the scenes.”

In fall 1995, Dean pleaded with Brian Collins and Bob Pierce (who had replaced Bob Collins as the Port Authority’s director) to allow his firm to continue working on the park.

Apparently, Collins and Pierce had told Sasaki that the Port Authority planned to terminate its agreement, though there is no documentation of such a correspondence in the Authority’s files. (Though the project’s files contain scads of documents produced by Sasaki officials, they today contain just two or three letters from the EDC staff members who were working on behalf of the Port Authority. Some of the Sasaki documents refer to specific letters and memos written by EDC staff. Current and past EDC staff members were unable to locate these documents for the Pitch and were unable to explain their absence. According to Missouri record-keeping laws, these apparent lapses of documentation aren’t legal.)

Dean argued that the Port Authority was still bound by Sasaki’s original contract and that it would be less costly to continue using the firm than to buy out the contract.

In January 1996, though, the Port Authority’s lawyers drafted papers killing the Sasaki agreement.

“We love Kansas City, me particularly,” says Dawson, still obviously crestfallen. “It would have been a feather in our cap, and yours as well, if we would have been able to complete the park as originally conceived.”

Officials close to the project tell the Pitch that the firm was let go because it was cheaper to work with a local firm to finish the park.

Suddenly rich with gambling money, the Port Authority could no longer afford to work with the high-class design firm.

But it wouldn’t be the last cut they’d make after hitting the jackpot.

The Bumpy Road

If Norman Rockwell had been alive in the mid-1990s, he might have painted a picture of an emaciated Kansas Citian shrugging from the bottom of a massive pothole.

That’s what had become of the “Kansas City Spirit” in the decades since Rockwell had immortalized a brawny man with his sleeves rolled up to symbolize the city’s can-do response to the mid-century flood. By the time the slot-machine sugar daddies rolled into town, the most immediate crisis in town was a $1.5 billion backlog of choked sewer drains, broken sidewalks and potholes.

Most of the gambling money went toward this still unfinished work.

Gambling had been a tough sell politically. Kansas City’s mayor at the time was, after all, an ordained minister who said he opposed gambling on moral grounds. And the city’s negotiations with Hilton Hotels Corp., Promus Cos. of Memphis, Tennessee (which represented Harrah’s), and Boyd Gaming Corp. (which represented Sam’s Town) happened to unfold during a mayoral election cycle.

The city was set to siphon money from the casinos in two ways: by taking a cut at the door (this year the city estimates it will earn around $21 million this way) and by charging casinos rent for their riverfront property (which brings in about $2 million a year). Early on, then-Mayor Emanuel Cleaver worked out a deal in which the biggest revenue stream would be directed toward the political issue du jour: the city’s backlog of capital improvements.

Documents obtained by the Pitch show that Collins and Pierce knew all along they’d be able to use only the measly rent money to fund the Port Authority’s riverfront dreams. They also knew that the $2 million a year — which would be delivered all at once in a $20 million ten-year bond — wouldn’t quite be enough to pay for Sasaki’s plans.

Yet they used the promise of a wonderful new riverfront park to convince voters to sign off on riverboat gambling (which turned out not to be riverboat gambling; the casinos sit in man-made moats of pumped-in river water). In 1993, the Port Authority threw $200,000 of taxpayers’ money into an ad campaign hyping the great things gambling would bring to Kansas City’s waterfront.

Even the naysayers on the editorial board of The Kansas City Star — who week after week railed against the prospect of “filthy commerce” — conceded that getting a riverfront park out of the deal might be a good thing.

A payout for smoothing the city’s streets and rebuilding crumbling bridges and sidewalks sounded much less exciting. But to this day, most of the gaming money has disappeared into those black holes.

George Blackwood, who had graduated from skippering the Port Authority to serving as mayor pro tem and chair of the City Council’s Finance and Audit Committee, was instrumental in negotiating the gambling deal. He had been one of the Port Authority dreamers who had dared to start planning a spectacular riverfront back in the late ’80s, when there were barely two nickels to pay for it. Now, three years after leaving public office, with an unused park on the ground, he says the city did the best it could.

“Just imagine where we’d be today with the city budget if we didn’t have that gambling money,” he says.

Kansas City’s elected leaders couldn’t manage to make legalized gambling pay for a signature riverfront park. But a few local law firms used it to make a lot of money.

Some represented the gaming companies. Jerry Riffel, for instance, worked for Hilton Hotels Inc. His connections and understanding of City Hall’s inner workings (he was a former City Council member and the newly appointed chair of the EDC) no doubt helped his clients ultimately win the bid to lease city land. One of Hilton’s competitors in the bid for the lease, Promus Corp. (which operates Harrah’s), secured the services of Craft Fridkin & Rhyne, a firm with ties to then-mayor Emanuel Cleaver. Prior to winning Promus as a client, Craft Fridkin & Rhyne had represented the Port Authority.

Craft Fridkin & Rhyne’s replacement, McDowell Rice Smith & Gaar, wound up billing the Port Authority close to a million dollars during a four-year stretch in the ’90s. “It was not a simple transaction,” Phil Kusnetzky, general counsel for the Port Authority and a lawyer with McDowell Rice, tells the Pitch.

From 1992 through 1995, while the gambling deals were being worked out, nearly all of the Port Authority’s checks — totaling more than $1.3 million — were written out to either lawyers or consultants, according to its annual financial statements.

By comparison, S. Preston Williams, a lawyer for tiny North Kansas City, says he worked out his client’s agreement with Harrah’s over a couple of weeks without adding one extra invoice to his $1,500-a-month retainer.

Asked why his bills were so much higher, Kusnetzky says, “It’s a little tough to explain something that took place years ago, but basically the Kansas City transaction was far more complicated than the others because it was a lease of ground on which Hilton could build a casino.”

But North Kansas City was in much the same situation as Kansas City when gambling arrived: It owned a piece of riverfront property and negotiated basically the same rent deal with Harrah’s as Kansas City had with Hilton: $2 million a year or a percentage of the total take, whichever was greater.

“I’ve represented the city for forty years,” North Kansas City’s Williams says. “We just went ahead and took care of it.”

The Subtractions

By the time the city signed its deal with Hilton, Elbert Anderson, a Cleaver appointee, chaired the Port Authority board. Glen LeRoy continued to serve for a while, but bowed out when he learned that his firm, Gould and Evans, would make a bid to design Hilton’s casino.

The first two months of 1996 were a busy time for the Port Authority.

In late January, the Anderson-led board agreed to issue a bond to pay for the park — then turned around and fired Sasaki, the firm that had designed it. Taliaferro & Browne took over the project. At a meeting in mid-February, Port Authority board members listened as the engineers and contractors told them the park’s design had to be revised, that it was a “tough site” for which the firm would have to “set [its] priorities.”

One other thing happened. Agents from the FBI visited the Port Authority’s offices on February 7. In a scandal that played out for the next few years, Anderson was arrested for bribing a City Council member and a county legislator, both of whom resigned. (One was indicted, and one pleaded guilty to criminal charges.) Three Hilton executives were fired for their involvement in a $250,000 grant paid to a company with ties to Anderson; Hilton paid a $500,000 fine to avoid a criminal trial.

Away from the headlines, though, the folks at Taliaferro & Browne quietly kept working on rebuilding the city’s riverfront.

But it quickly became an exercise in subtraction.

“We’d design a little bit of it, and Turner [the construction contractor] would price it,” recalls Leonard Graham. “We’d design a little bit more, and Turner would price it. When Turner came back and said, ‘We need more than $20 million,’ we eliminated it.” Graham pauses, then clarifies, “I won’t say they were eliminated. They were postponed.”

Out went the fish fountains, the river overlooks, the stage, the steps to the river’s edge, the marina and the drinking fountains. Even the park benches.

Instead of putting in so much as one cheap wooden bench, the firm chose to decorate the park with slabs of rough-cut limestone that, for the average butt, provide only about five minutes of comfortable sitting.

Why? Graham rubs his thumb and forefinger together: “Twenty million. There wasn’t enough money.”

Part of the plan was to extend Grand Avenue down into the park, and that ate up a huge chunk of the project’s budget. The road was so expensive that it couldn’t even be built according to plan. Originally billed as a boulevard, it turned out to be a dangerously skinny two-lane overpass.

Just a few years earlier, when his clients at the Port Authority had no idea where the money was going to come from, Graham’s firm had been helping to design an elaborate park. Now, after the arrival of gambling and all its millions, he and his crew suddenly found themselves yanking all the goodies. But Graham didn’t find this troubling.

“I looked at it like, had gambling not come, you wouldn’t have anything,” he says.

But even this take-what-we-can-get logic fails to explain the lack of park benches.

Plain old wooden park benches. Surely there was some room in that $20 million budget to buy at least two or three of those for what’s now known as Berkley Riverfront Park.

Facing hard financial decisions, they chose real-estate-brochure beauty over butt-friendly comfort.

The Diss

Within a few months of the ribbon cutting, Star writers started bitching about the park. It’s a dead zone, they wrote. It’s empty. One declared that she felt safe down there only when she brought along her big dog.

But park planners had known it would be that way. All along, they had said that the park would feel less isolated once someone put up some buildings along its south ring. Then people would start showing up to enjoy the park’s green lawns and views of the river and skyline.

This makes sense to Dan Musser, vice president of Zimmer Companies, a local development powerhouse that helped raise Crown Center and is now working with Lenexa to craft a much-ballyhooed “new urbanist” town center. But he’s perplexed as to why it hasn’t happened yet.

Especially given that his own company has already submitted a viable plan to develop the riverfront land. Twice.

“We were willing to do it,” Musser says. “We were willing to spend some money.”

His company put in its first proposal five years ago, in response to a request from the Port Authority. If Zimmer’s proposal had been accepted, Musser says, a handful of buildings would now be huddled near the park.

Zimmer wasn’t the only company to make a proposal. Also joining the dance was Hunt Midwest, owner of the underground warehouse Subtropolis and developer of various residential subdivisions north of the river.

“I think it’s a site with great potential,” says Lee Derrough, president of Hunt Midwest. “Obviously, there’s some ego gratification in doing something like that. We wouldn’t have gone after it if we weren’t excited about it. It’s the front door to the city. You want to put on a good face for people coming in.”

So what happened to the companies’ proposals?

The folks at Zimmer say they never heard back from Port Authority staffers.

The response was a little better for Hunt Midwest. “They ultimately got back to us,” Derrough says. “But it wasn’t the most professional situation.”

As the newly instated director of the Port Authority, Brian Collins was instrumental in nixing the plans. “They’re right,” he admits now. “The process was clumsy.”

Collins says he rejected the proposals because the riverfront didn’t just need developers. “It needed tenants,” he explains.

Zimmer and Hunt Midwest didn’t have any tenants lined up, Collins says. He says that having new buildings — but no tenants — would have put the city “in the position of not being able to market the site internationally.”

In other words, had the Port Authority turned the vacant land over to a profit-minded developer, it might have been covered with piddly stuff like restaurants and small businesses and apartments. Then the city might not have been able to persuade some huge company — perhaps one like (the now bankrupt) Farmland or (the now layoff-happy) Sprint or (the now downgraded-to-junk-bond-status) Aquila — to move there.

By contrast, Derrough says, “We went in offering reality.”

Both firms are bitter about their experiences with the Port Authority.

“We took a chance,” Musser says. “We don’t mind competing. But it was a little frustrating to go through the whole process and have them not do anything.” (Musser’s company was willing to build next to the park even though he knew some of the land was contaminated — see sidebar.)

Derrough feels the same way. “The frustration level goes higher when you lose out and nothing happens,” he says. “Then when you come out again and the same thing happens, you say to yourself, how often do you want to be smacked around?”

The Beer Bash

After Kay Barnes was elected mayor, the EDC and the Port Authority underwent a sea change. Barnes asked Port Authority board members to resign, and soon thereafter several top administrators — Brian Collins among them — also left. New law firms — all major contributors to Barnes’ campaign — nabbed lucrative contracts.

Philosophies changed, too. Shortly after being named chairman of the Port Authority, radio executive Bill Johnson confessed to the Star, “I don’t personally care for the park. It looks like a tree farm.”

Now he tells the Pitch, “From my perspective, the park is pretty much where it should be at this time.”

A lot has happened during the three years between those two comments.

Barnes’ new Port Authority assessed the situation and discovered the obvious: The park isn’t serving anyone.

Its response?

Form a committee and hire some consultants.

To form the committee, Port Authority Director Pat Sterrett in March 2000 mailed a form letter to “community stakeholders” who might have an interest in shaping the future of the riverfront.

As for the consultants, Kansas City’s Bucher, Willis & Ratliff, their first task was to survey city residents on their feelings about the park.

Port Authority officials learned that more than half of Kansas City’s population didn’t even know the park existed.

Worse, almost half of the poll respondents who lived downtown — within an easy bike ride of the park — didn’t know about it.

When asked what they’d like to see in the park, Kansas Citians unanimously said they wanted the same thing the KU students had envisioned when they designed Spirit Park back in the late ’80s.

Armed with this shocking new data, the task-force members worked with Bucher, Willis & Ratliff, to redesign the park. Within a year, the firm had delivered a beautiful schematic that included all the elements that had been taken out of the Sasaki design — the amphitheater, the overlooks, the gardens, the fountains.

The Port Authority essentially scrapped the designs they’d bought for $500,000 and redid the whole thing for $40,000.

Instead of fish fountains, this park’s attractions were based on an international sister-city concept — a smattering of gardens arranged to represent our symbolic siblings in China, Nigeria, Taiwan, Israel, Tanzania, Mexico, Sierra Leone, Japan and Germany.

Meanwhile, the Port Authority board members and the EDC staff sought to address other issues raised by the survey. Respondents had overwhelmingly agreed that what they really wanted in a riverfront park was lots of activity. Concerts. Festivals. Fireworks.

Which brings us to beer.

Andi Udris, an Ohioan whom Kansas City leaders recruited to head the EDC a year ago, proposed the idea for this weekend’s Oktoberfest after seeing several massively successful city-supported keggers in Cincinnati.

After an early summer fake-Elton John concert that flopped, EDC officials have backed the Oktoberfest with a $75,000 promotional campaign.

Udris and Port Authority board members hope the party will generate public interest in the area.

To handle the beer-guzzling crowd, the EDC will have to haul in dozens of port-a-potties. Sterrett has told the Pitch that bathrooms are one of the amenities he wishes his predecessors had added to the park, but they were nixed from the plans during the halcyon days of Sasaki because the cost of pumping the water out ($500,000) would have been too much. They might also have created a “security risk” by attracting bums and undesirable activities to the park.

Other ideas hatched years ago are finally beginning to crystallize. A few weeks ago, Port Authority officials cut the ribbon on a hip-looking pedestrian walkway stretching over the river’s edge. It cost a little more than $4 million to build and was paid for with money from the casino lease, an insurance settlement and several state and federal grants.

By next summer, that bridge is supposed to be connected to Berkley Park by a serpentine bike path, promises Sterrett. (It will cost $908,000 and be paid for with city and federal funds.) In between, on a lot overrun with cracked asphalt and tall weeds, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans to use $2.8 million in federal funds to create a wetlands with ponds and footpaths, also expected to be open by next summer. And Port Authority officials hope to announce in a few weeks the long-awaited addition of a boat ramp downstream.

When it comes to the latest redesign of Berkley Park, no one knows where that money’s coming from.

Sterrett estimates that the amphitheater will cost between $5 million and $7 million. The Port Authority has put together Friends of the River, another stakeholder group that would presumably generate interest within business and philanthropic circles. Leonard Graham has joined the effort, and former-Mayor Berkley has been named its honorary chairman.

Graham believes the riverfront will one day realize all its potential.

“Someday,” Graham says, “a powerful developer from New York will be driving to the airport, and he’ll see this park and he’ll say, ‘What’s all this?’ And we’ll say, ‘That’s something we have for development.’ And he’ll say, ‘What?! You have 50 acres here on your riverfront and it’s not developed?!’ And he’ll go home, and he’ll start scratching his head. And pretty soon he’ll be back with a plan.”

If this developer really is from somewhere else, maybe this time the job will get done.