An 18-hole, lakeside public golf course with driving range (can you imagine something like Sankaty Head on the shores of Lake Erie?). A Great Lawn with an observation tower. Restaurants lining a beachside promenade. An upscale hotel overlooking a set of soccer fields.
These are just a handful of ideas the city has drummed up lately that could come to fruition in the future amid its arduous battle to try and close down Burke Lakefront Airport, which eats up hundreds of acres of prime lakefront space and loses roughly $1 million a year.
Two concepts, depicted in renderings released Wednesday, are the first actual drawings showing what Burke’s future may look like if Cleveland’s able to close the airport down. These are just drawings, not plans, waterfront authority czar Scott Skinner said at a press conference. But, if really built out, various options could generate $800 million in economic impact and some $6 million a year in tax revenue.
“I want to emphasize this is not a master plan,” Skinner told press on Wednesday afternoon from the second story of Nuevo, overlooking Burke.
“This is a tool to facilitate conversation both with City Council and with the general public,” he said, flanked by Deputy Chief of Staff Jessica Trivisonno. “And it’s an exercise to see what we could actually fit on Burke.”
City Council has been holding public information sessions this year to gauge both Clevelanders’ interest in shutting Burke down for good along with determining, in a meeting of the minds fashion, how to proceed afterward, if it happens.
The answer from most public officials has so far been a hell yes on that front. Along with doubling the acreage of park space on the lakefront—by a whopping 422 acres—converting Burke into an outdoor complex on Lake Erie would provide “substantially more economic impact and direct tax revenue to the city than Burke does in its current capacity,” a recent study showed.
Which Clevelanders seem pretty hyped about. As of Wednesday, of the 2,400 responders to the Northcoast Waterfront Development Corporation’s latest Burke survey, almost 90 percent of the public said they’d support creating a “more accessible lakefront.”
Access, Skinner and Trivisonno reminded reporters, that doesn’t exactly mean tapping into city funds. The concepts released Wednesday—showing an enticing golf course, hotels, a youth sports center and even a helipad—could be totally built by private builders who aim to operate them.
And yes, they said, everything aforementioned can be built on Burke’s dredged land mass. Regardless of soil contamination.
“We’ve come to the conclusion that low density, these sort of recreation uses, can be built on Burke without any unusually high costs,” Skinner said. He looked out to Voinovich Park. “We’re sitting on landfill right now. We’ve built on this material before and quite often.”
Both said they met with a coalition of concerned Burke tenants in January to discuss where traffic may be sent if and when the airport is no more. Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne suggested to Scene earlier this year that the county airport could handle that traffic.
“I was personally surprised to find out that a lot of our big corporate partners don’t use Burke,” Trivisonno said on that front. (It ices over in the winter.) “They fly out of Hopkins.”
The two concepts will likely be talked about at two City Council meetings revolving around Burke’s future, which are planned for April 1 and April 15.
And even if the city’s able to shut down the airport before the end of the decade, Skinner said there would still be years of community feedback to take in.
“I would miss the Air Show,” a woman in her fifties from Bowling Green told Scene a stone’s throw away from Burke on Wednesday. “Just cause that’s how I knew it growing up. So, it’d be hard to see it different.” (Skinner said Burke could still host the Air Show even if planes didn’t take off and land there.)
Scene showed her the concepts.
“I’m sure it’d bring in a lot of money and more people for sure,” she said. “It would be neat.”
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