Sta Prunes Tree Size; Price Still Grows Committee Decides On Shorter Bamboo Trees For Downtown Bus Plaza

The Florida bamboo trees destined to decorate the downtown Spokane bus station are growing in price but shrinking in height.

Spokane Transit Authority officials and consultants said Wednesday they are buying 20-foot trees for $2,000 each rather than the 26-foot specimens they had been looking to get for $1,500.

The trees originally picked for the station jumped more than $1,000 in price and also were unsuitable because their height would have interfered with the visibility of secondfloor retail signs.

Thirty-six of the timber bamboos will cost $72,000 to decorate the STA transit center, under construction at Riverside and Wall.

Other plants and a three-year maintenance contract with Spokane Plant Interiors raises the total cost to an estimated $136,000.

STA’s $20.6 million Plaza is to open this summer as a “showcase” hub for sheltering waiting bus passengers and unclogging sidewalks along which buses now pick up riders.

STA Plaza Steering Committee members got one last chance Wednesday to change their minds about the bamboo trees, described by a horticulturist as delicate and easily shocked by temperature fluctuations.

The panel reaffirmed that bamboo is worth the risk because it complements the bus station’s parklike theme - a waterfall plunging between two escalators and below a huge skylight.

Temperatures in new buildings typically vary up to 10 degrees the first year as kinks are worked out in the heating and cooling systems, warned Dick Lopes, project manager for Shea Construction Co.

Committee member Don Harmon said the bus station will draw “undesirables” and vandals who might leave doors open on purpose in the dead of winter or carve their initials and other graffiti on the trunks.

Critics have called the bus Plaza a glorified homeless shelter.

To combat that, the building will include a police substation on the first floor, several video surveillance cameras and STA’s own security guards.

“You’re going to find a lot of people in there you don’t want in there, and you can’t keep them out. I’m not comfortable with this,” said Harmon, Airway Heights mayor and a recent committee addition.

The last-minute doubts over bamboo, considering that STA bid the landscape portion of the project last summer, provoked committee member and Spokane City Councilwoman Bev Numbers.

“We should have had this discussion before we went out for bid,” she said.

But STA Executive Director Allen Schweim and Lopes said they wanted the committee to know all the downsides before the agency plunked down its money.

That time is now, they said, because the trees are not getting cheaper.

The landscape contract calls for 26-foot-tall bamboo trees in clusters of six in each of six large planters.

The price for these trees was $1,500 each but now is $2,500.

David Peterson, of Goodale & Barbieri Real Estate Management, said retailers being recruited for the plaza’s second floor won’t like trees blocking their signs.

So the Steering Committee dropped the tree height six feet, which brought the unexpected savings of $500 per tree.

The 36 trees will be shipped in a few months in a climate-controlled truck. That’s included in the price.

In other action, the committee approved 19 new construction change orders.

On the building alone, 148 design and construction revisions have contributed to $2 million in cost overruns.

Envisioned in early 1992 to cost $12 million, including $4 million for the land, the Plaza is nearly $20 million and counting because of inflation, a lawsuit against the building and resulting delays, last-minute design revisions and blunders, officials concede.

Wednesday’s rehash of an old issue - bamboo - was prompted by finger-pointing critics, Schweim said.

“That’s the litany of this project. The community is always secondguessing us,” he said.