The city's trying to decide how to bring food and drink to White Rock ...

Following our pieces about the city's revived efforts to privatize Dallas Farmers Market, a friend of the show suggested we look into whether the city is considering stirring a little private biz into the publicly owned White Rock Lake -- specifically, eat-and-drinkeries like, oh, say, the Katy Trail Ice House. Because, after all, right now, if you want to get a drink after a day hiking or biking around the lake, your options include a water fountain or ... well, a water fountain.

Turns out, according to some folks at Dallas City Hall, this has been a subject in which Mayor Mike Rawlings has been interested since his tenure as Park Board president. But for now, all the mayor's chief of staff, Paula Blackmon, is willing to say on the subject is this: "White Rock Lake is a gem in our city, and we need to make sure it's used at a balanced capacity."

She will say: Do not use the word "privatize," not about White Rock Lake. The city, she says, is merely "exploring opportunities to maximize its potential."

Architect Gerry Worrall III, Sheffie Kadane's appointee to the Park Board and the liaison between the city and the White Rock Foundation, says discussions about bringing food and drink to White Rock Lake have been "casual" to this point. The question, he says, remains: "Do you create something new or take existing facilities and turn them into places where you can eat and drink?"

And that's not an easy question to answer.

Worrall and other White Rock Lake advocates say they're concerned about converting the recently renovated Big Thicket or Winfrey Point into full-time restaurants and bars because, more than anything else, doing so could create an influx of traffic for which the neighborhood isn't prepared. (And the city also says it's making a decent amount of coin leasing out those facilities, among others; calls are to Park and Rec officials.)

"The challenges are many," Worrall says. "There are times when it would be a lovely thing to add. But right now you have special events out there that draw people that overwhelm the park and the neighborhoods, and people ave acclimated to that special use. But if you do a food facility that draws in a certain amount of traffic on a regular basis, that's a different dynamic. There would be support from the pedestrian and bike users; for them it would be ideal. But the neighborhood might have another opinion."

Absolutely, says White Rock Foundation Treasurer Susan Falvo, who represents the Lakewood Neighborhood Association on the White Rock Lake Park Task Force, which consists of dozens of area neighborhood associations. New traffic "is always a concern," says Falvo. "That's why things don't occur there a lot of the time -- because it's everybody's lake."

That's why Worrall's proposing going with food trucks for now, which itself is no easy feat around White Rock. He reminds that there's a whole process in place that involves finding a spot, going through the Park Board, getting the city council's OK ... and so forth. Falvo notes they could appear as soon as the White Rock Lake Festival, which has been moved from May to November 10-11 this year.

"It wouldn't be undertaken casually," Worrall says, "even though these are somewhat temporary in nature. ... But it'd be nice to try those out in different locations around the lake, because it's not permanent and can be eased into and still maintain the beauty of the park around the lake. That's the challenge: creating an environment people want to use and not overwhelm the beauty of the lake."

Source: http://cityhallblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2012/03/the-citys-trying-to-decide-how.html

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