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A plan by Duquesne Light to build a cooling station in Allegheny Commons Park is drawing heat from the community because of its encroachment on the park's green space and interference with efforts to restore the park -- the city's oldest -- to its original look.
The controversy comes to a head at a community meeting tomorrow night where all sides will weigh in on the issue.
Duquesne Light officials say they need the station to house transmission equipment to upgrade service and allow for more efficient cooling of lines, said spokesman Joseph Vallarian.
The latest proposal would put the boxlike metal station -- roughly 9 feet tall by 28 feet long -- in the middle of park's northeastern section, which is being restored in phases with period design and repair of pathways, a formal tree-lined promenade and its original grand fountains.
"We're engaged in a $2.2 million restoration of the northeast Commons and have spent a lot of time and money in these efforts, which we believe will spur economic development," said Alida Baker, manager of the project for the Allegheny Commons Restoration Initiative, which doesn't want the station in the park.
"We have precious little green space in this community," she added.
But Duquesne Light officials said the station needs to go in that section of the park to be over the electric lines that run underground between substations in Lawrenceville and Brunot's Island in the Ohio River.
"This is very critical infrastructure for Downtown and the North Side, a reliability issue that has been identified by state and federal [utility] authorities," Mr. Vallarian said. "We have made generous offers and have tried to work with them on the aesthetics," only to be turned down every time by the initiative, he said.
The controversy has come to a popping point in the neighborhood, where residents have been passing e-mails calling this "a shocking" development. Fliers without letterhead or contact information also are being circulated in the neighborhood urging residents to bring pressure on Duquesne Light.
The community meeting will be held 6:30 p.m. tomorrow at the New Hazlett Theater in Allegheny Center. Duquesne Light will send a representative or two, and organizers of the meeting will collect signatures on a petition calling for the utility to build its station along the nearby street grid, not in the park.
The location of the station would have to pass muster with the city, but procedural details could not be clarified in time for this story.
For months officials from Duquesne Light and the restoration initiative have been proposing and rejecting each others' ideas for where the station will be and how it would look.
The initiative favored an earlier proposal that would have put the station outside the park along the street grid on Union Avenue, a little nub of a street near the Allegheny Center Alliance Church. "We're just asking for a few extra feet," Ms. Baker said about moving the station to the street grid. "It seems like there would be an engineering solution to this."
She said Duquesne Light also nixed burying the station.
"We do understand it [the cooling station] is an important project," she acknowledged.
Mr. Vallarian, the Duquesne Light spokesman, said a dimension for the station has not been decided and that the utility has been working hard with the initiative to come up with an agreeable plan.
One idea the utility suggested was to hide the equipment in a public restroom that Duquesne Light would build for the park. Another idea was to hide it in an archway entrance to the park. Neither structure would fly under the initiative's restoration plan; such structures did not exist in the park when it was designed.
"We're five months behind schedule now," said Mr. Vallarian. "We're going to have to do something ... soon."
First Published September 27, 2009 12:00 am
