What to Make of the Neuse River Park?

What to Make of the Neuse River Park?

a Carolina Paddler Article

Text and photography by Alton Chewning

-Having whitewater features on the Neuse River in Raleigh has long been a dream of area paddlers.  Perhaps no one has invested more time in bringing this desire to fruition than Elizabeth Gardner.  Gardner has led efforts to realize this hope for many years, more than she cares to count.  Friday, November 3rd, was another step on this path and perhaps a substantial one. Raleigh voters recently passed a bond referendum for new parks.  Money has been approved for a Neuse River Park project.  The big question remaining for paddlers is… what, if any, whitewater features will be included?

People gathered at Abbot’s Creek Community Center in Raleigh to learn more about the many worthwhile shapes the park could take.  There were conservation people, local homeowners, movers and shakers in the sports world and a box turtle.  Some were advocating, perhaps gently, but all were trying to exchange information.  What were the possibilities, what purposes could the park fulfill?  Here a few snapshots of people and plans associated with the project.  Following these will be an interview Carolina Paddler did with T.J. McCourt, a lead planner with Raleigh Parks and Scott Shipley, a consultant on the project and the lead designer of the White Water Center in Charlotte and numerous other parks across the nation.

This event was about hearing the community’s preferences.  What features would citizens like the new park to have?

Not just the natural features but the other refinements that make a park beautiful and inviting. How much to enhance nature and promote conservation and environmental concerns.

The box turtle was probably wondering, “What’s in it for me and my people?”

There were the individuals, each with hopes for the park, for what opportunities it would bring.

Elizabeth Gardner, who’s labored so long to make whitewater a part of Neuse River Park.

Hill Carrow, who led the effort behind the 1987 Olympic Festival in the Triangle and who’s doing the same with the 2029 World University Games.

Shane Brown, the CCC Conservation Chair and a national competitor in Free Style events.

Steve Lightenberg, an avid paddler and international kayak instructor, who’s new to the area and wants to get involved.

Scott Shipley, who is here to advise Raleigh Parks, to learn what is needed and desired and to share his experience in bringing it off.

And the planners, like T. J. McCourt, whose job it is to find out what the community wants and how to build something we can all enjoy.

It was a time of sharing enthusiasm and expertise, for forming new relationships, new collaborations.

Let’s hope the information flows to the people who fill out the survey, who compile the results, who ask the right questions, who influence the decisions, who make the new park an outdoor centerpiece of Raleigh’s future.

To take the survey please go to this link. The survey closes at the end of the month.  Please “choose whitewater”.

The following is an interview of with Scott Shipley of S2O Design and Engineering and T.J. McCourt, a Planning Supervisor with the City of Raleigh Parks Department.  The interview was conducted by Alton Chewning.

The interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

AC:  Scott, we’re here at a public workshop so people can understand more about the Neuse project.  Why are you here?

Shipley:  We take part in a lot of public processes. With different projects in different places with different purposes. So, in this case we’re looking to envision with the community how to develop the park space. And that can mean anything from landside park space with hills and climbing walls and parking areas or whatever the case may be from this process.  On the riverside we’re at an area that has been identified as a possible whitewater park site.  It’s also a part of a Blueways trail that the city is developing now in terms of getting people out and active on the river. So, we’re collecting input and turning that into information the decision makers can use to decide what to do.

AC:  Your company, S2O, does water parks and water courses.  Can you talk about a few that you’ve done?

Shipley:  Our park most people know here, the US National White Water Center in Charlotte, is actually quite different from what we’re looking at in this town,  But it’s the same idea.  How do we get people…. How do we bring the mountain to Mohammed in that sense of.. how do we get people to access the outdoors and healthy outdoor active life styles right where they live.  So, instead of having to wait for three or four times a year to go to the mountains… when you go to the White Water Center, it’s not just whitewater, it’s trails and climbing and ropes courses and flatwater paddling and all these different things so the idea is how do you get everyone in the family to put down their iPads and get outside.

AC:  TJ, you’ve been involved in the planning of this for ten years now.  How do you feel about the progress at this point?

McCourt:  It’s good.  It’s exciting. We got funding through a parks bond referendum last year in 2022. The City passed a parks bond referendum for $275 million to fund parks development all around the city of Raleigh, the Neuse River Park master plan and money to move right on into design and construction once we finish the master plan.  It was funded through that bond referendum for 11.5 million for this project.  So this is the kick off of the master plan process.  This public workshop going on tonight is the first of three or four public workshops that’s we’ll do over the next year or so developing the master plan.  This is an opportunity to get people in the door.  Learn a little bit about the site, about the park, about the project and start brainstorming and getting some ideas together, getting a sense of how the community wants to see it developed.

AC:  Why do you have Mr. Shipley here?

McCourt: We hire expert consultants whenever we can, whenever we’re doing a city park project,  a design project and so Scott is a member, and his company is a member, of the design consulting team, Design Workshop, the lead designer of landscape architects.  They are responsible for helping us develop the master plan for the entire park. Scott and his crew bring the whitewater expertise and that kind of instream construction experience to the table. Since we know whitewater is a potential component of this project, we wanted to make sure we had folks with plenty of real world experience seeing how these things get done, what the pros and cons are, what the process looks like, just so the city can be as informed as possible.  Consider all the potential opportunities we have on how this could develop.

AC:  Scott, when you’re looking at a new area, how do you determine how the natural features can be incorporated to make some sort of whitewater experience that is durable.

Shipley:  In a project like this, it’s the early days so what we’re doing right now is community based.  From within that community is it something they want to do, do they understand the implementation in terms of construction and expenses, changes to what’s out there now and changes for people who use that part of town.  So, right now, it’s about information. At the same time, we’re looking at it from a physical standpoint, is it possible?  You hate to go way down a road and find out, well, it’s actually flatwater and that’s that.  In this case, this second part is very hard to determine because there is a huge permitting hurdle around this river and some unknowns even as we talk to those regulators.  Until you turn a permit in you won’t know things like, “is this protected water with the lower dam taken out?”

AC:  You did the Catawba Great Falls project and FERC was a big part of your planning.

Shipley:  What was interesting about the Catawba project was it was established it would be a white water park from the start. That was established by FERC as part of their renegotiating the licensing of the dam.  So, yeah, there was less of a public process there. Duke Power was a great partner in that, and it was more determined by that FERC process.

In this case, it’s a different set up.  What is interesting is that it is a divided channel and so you could have one flow for habitat or connectivity and the other side could be more focused on recreation. There are some unique opportunities this layout affords.  The other neat thing is that it is a special part of the river.  When you go down there and bushwhack into where we are in there, it’s not a part that most people have in their downtown core.  Where you can go and be in a riparian zone with mature hardwoods and beautiful river environment.  One of the unique side effects of this is it’s not just for “wet” people but the dry side, where you’re bringing people down to what they wouldn’t normally experience.  You’re getting a Greenway that’s up on the bank which it should be, right?  But at the same time, when you penetrate down to the river corridor, it’s beautiful down there.

AC:  So, some people will look down and wonder what’s going on in the river and be intrigued.

Shipley:  On average for our whitewater parks, one out of seven people get wet.  So, it’s also a park amenity, right, people want to sit by the river and read a book or they want to have a picnic or quincenera or what have you down by the river.  To have people down and close to the area does create a draw for that.  I could go into the weeds forever because greenways are that way, they need an anchor point somewhere, which is what this park will be, whether on the river or not.

McCourt:  I’m glad you mentioned it because it really is a hidden gem in Raleigh, that area down on the southern channel where the whitewater features are proposed is beautiful right now.  A lot of people do use it.  On a good summer day there will be people splashing around in the wading pools, people fishing from the banks, it is a great area and regardless of the way the whitewater specific conversation goes, it’s a goal of the city through this park development program to find a way to get more people down to the water, one way or another.  Help them be aware of the river, realize what we have, right here in our backyard.  If it ends up being a more heavily developed whitewater park, fantastic, and if it ends up being more canoe/kayak oriented, think more of the Neuse as a paddling trail, that’s a great outcome too.  One way or another, we want to make it so that water is accessible to as many people as possible, so you don’t have to go bushwhacking and scramble down the roots on the riverbank to get there.

AC: T. J., what do you see as the biggest challenge at this point to getting the park underway?

McCourt:  I don’t see any challenges at this point.  It’s going through the process, and we have a very intentional process for how we conduct park master plans in efforts like this one.  This first phase we’re in right now is big ideas, brainstorming, thinking about general community priorities, what direction we want to head.  The next phase, which will kick off in the spring, so a February-March timeline, we’ll come out with a few different alternatives, alternative site designs.  For example, one might include whitewater features and a more active/rcreation/adventure-oriented park design.  You might have one on the opposite end of the spectrum that’s much more about ecological protection and conservation. We do this intentionally, we lay out these alternatives along the spectrum and test those ideas with the public at large, with the community and find out which elements of each of those designs resonate with people, what direction we ultimately want to take the master plan.

AC:  You have a slalom background and originally slalom parks were in natural settings but for various reasons, like accessibility, and uniformity, they became more human made.  Your background is in slalom, does that lead you naturally to building these sorts of courses?  And you have an engineering background.

Shipley:. I raced in three Olympics for whitewater slalom and raced on a lot of those courses in Europe and lived in Germany for a long period of time and trained with that team.  I saw the impact of bringing this outdoor sport, this sort of X-Game type of sport, into your city core. How kids could access it and how they could have a meaningful childhood in a sport they love, in a sport I love and that’s why I became passionate about doing similar parks here in America and we’ve done a bunch since. You can see the impact.  Take Charlotte for example, the economic impact in Charlotte is about 100 million dollars a year.  That’s some at the whitewater park but it’s also hotel room stays and shopping and restaurants…. Even in small parks, like the one in Golden, Colorado, it’s about a four- or five-million-dollar impact.  There’s no charge to use their river, it’s like the Neuse, you can get on it wherever you want and take out where you want as long as it’s not private property.  At the same time people who go to events there or come into town to float and to have lunch and to shop and to spend money in the town, they can have a real impact. That’s why towns and cities are looking at these.