Highland Park tries to stop Mockingbird rumors

[Cheesesteak]

Highland Park tries to stop Mockingbird rumors

Town Council hires PR firm to help keep residents up to date

Thursday, March 30, 2006
By KRISTEN HOLLAND / The Dallas Morning News

These past few months, Highland Park Town Council meetings haven't been their usual bastions of civility.

Residents have vilified the proposed multimillion-dollar plan to reconstruct Mockingbird Lane, fearing that initial plans to widen the road would increase traffic and safety problems.

Other than the night Mayor Bill White jokingly referred to a group of residents as the "Mockingbird Lynch Committee," council members and town staff have taken the criticism in stride.

No more, though.

Armed with new traffic studies and ideas from arborists and landscape architects, Highland Park is fighting back with facts and some public relations help. Mr. White said the council is moving toward starting the preliminary design phase in late April.

The town "may have to wait a whole other year if we don't do it now," Mr. White said.

And Highland Park is taking steps to curb the unrelenting rumor mill.

Officials recently signed a $10,000 contract with the LeMaster Group, a local public relations firm, to keep residents up to date on projects, including Mockingbird Lane.

And, beginning this week, data and studies the town receives about the Mockingbird project will be posted on its Web site, www.hptx.org. Officials are also considering creating a Web site for all things Mockingbird.

Mr. White said he's mostly to blame for many people believing that Highland Park plans to turn Mockingbird into a four- to six-lane thoroughfare with zero trees.

"I have done a terrible job of communicating to the community as to exactly what we are planning to do," he said. "I'm getting better at it, but I was not good at all."

Residents have been critical of the project because early plans proposed widening the road between Hillcrest Avenue and the Dallas North Tollway. Those residents argue that a wider road will entice more drivers to Mockingbird, reducing safety along a street that has two elementary schools and a middle/intermediate school campus within walking distance.

Sarah Clark, who lives a block north of Mockingbird, said the town definitely needs some public relations help. "I have thought, frankly, all along that part of their issue was communication and forthrightness," she said.

The Highland Park resident added that while it's a good move on the town's part, she would rather see money spent on additional studies about traffic and safety around schools.

Mr. White said the council is doing that. Last week, the town's public works committee met with representatives from engineering firms Carter & Burgess and Kimley-Horn to discuss ways to ease traffic.

Mr. White isn't just preaching about Mockingbird at council meetings. In the past week, he has spoken before three groups of Realtors to quash rumors that Highland Park plans to turn Mockingbird into a major thoroughfare.

The meetings were arranged after homeowners and real estate agents complained that buyers had stopped looking on Mockingbird because of the reconstruction plans, Mr. White said.

No decisions have been made, but the mayor says the most likely scenario calls for slightly narrowing the roadway from 30-31 feet to 28-30 feet along most of Mockingbird.

The section beginning about 90 feet west of Lomo Alto Drive and stretching to the Dallas North Tollway would widen by no more than 3 feet to create an additional turning lane.

Residents have said they don't want that stretch of road widened, but Mr. White said the extra room is needed because the town can't change the timing of traffic lights at the tollway. "Only 14 cars can get through," he said during Monday's council meeting.

A block east of the tollway, at Lomo Alto, 28 vehicles get through the light, which is timed by the town.

Mr. White said the town is likely to add left-turn lanes at two or three intersections between Hillcrest and Fairfield avenues, rather than the 10 proposed in the conceptual plans. He said that Golf Drive and High School Avenue are all but definite. Adding a left-turn lane at Byron Avenue is a possibility, depending on community interest, he said.

If approved, those intersections will expand from about 31 feet by a foot or two, said Meran Dadgostar, Highland Park's town engineer.

Don Chase, a resident on the town's Mockingbird Lane Reconstruction Committee, said it looks like town leaders have finally "recognized that the residents are really into this thing."

[Kappas Are Yummy]

Leaders of most municipalities would kill to have the "problems" of the Park Cities.

[McClown27]

Leaders of most municipalities would kill to have the "problems" of the Park Cities.

Poor us, we have to have road construction that might obstruct our social life.