Community Corner

Columbia Association to Pay for Lakefront Designs

Ideas include more outdoor dining by the water.

The Columbia Association has hired former Jim Rouse land planner Cy Paumier to develop a series of designs to improve the Lakefront, one of the city’s main gathering places, staff members said Monday.

Paumier, who worked for the for three years—the company that developed Columbia—said one of Rouse’s big dreams was to make the Lakefront like Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, Denmark, a famous garden and entertainment attraction.

“I always had a dream we’d make the Lakefront a whole lot more attractive than it is,” Paumier said Monday. “It’s the only public space of any consequence today. Its potential could be so much greater.”

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Originally, Paumier, along with a group of longtime Columbia residents, suggested a planning analysis of several parks, plazas and pedestrian areas in Columbia’s town center, according to a Columbia Association staff report.

The board decided instead to focus Paumier’s team’s analysis on the Lakefront, property the Columbia Association owns, said Jane Dembner, the Columbia Association’s director of community planning.

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Columbia’s downtown public spaces are owned by a variety of entities, including the Columbia Association, General Growth Properties and Howard County, which owns 4.76 acres in downtown that encompasses the Banneker Fire Station and the Central Library, according to a county land ownership map.

Paumier’s ideas include a better Lakefront walkway that is closer to the water, as well as a doubling or tripling of outdoor dining.

He also said he’d like the Lakefront to be a more comfortable place to sit.

“The banks are very steep—people can’t sit on slopes,” he said. “We’d like to create an amphitheater, where it’s comfortable seating. Now on Fourth of July—they are so steep, they are not comfortable to walk up and down."

The Columbia Association will spend up to $10,000 to cover the costs of the designs provided by Paumier and his team--a decision the Columbia Association board made at its July 14 meeting.

Paumier will be working with former Rouse Company employees Mike Riemer, Monk Askew, Jervis Dorton and Robert Tennenbaum, he said.

Board members Tom Coale and Andrew Stack opposed the funding decision, which was not submitted for a competitive bid, according to explorehoward.com.

Coale wrote on his blog, HoCoRising, that he was concerned that the proposal did not seek outside vendors and that Paumier’s proposals would not be limited to the Lakefront and Plaza.

Dembner said Paumier’s conceptual plan, which she said she would like to focus on the “connectivity to the lake and around the lake,” is due in November.

“We are a much bigger city than before,” she said. “It [the Lakefront] doesn’t work well for the large crowds and events we have. That’s the reason we are doing this.”

As part of the redevelopment of downtown Columbia, one of Howard County’s major initiatives, landowners in Columbia such as the Columbia Association must submit their improvement proposals to Howard County for review, said Bill Mackey, the Howard County chief of comprehensive and community planning.


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