TCC’S epic vision wound up unfocused

At least Tarrant County College has stopped digging.

That’s the first rule when you’re stuck in a hole, and TCC’s downtown campus was a black hole indeed, sucking down money like oxygen. Now the college district is punting its plans for a new deal to take over RadioShack’s headquarters, and we’re supposed to believe that two wrongs can make a right?

Maybe it’ll work out fine for TCC and its students, and RadioShack will get what it cares about most these days — another way to cut costs and become even less visible. But don’t count this as a "win-win," to quote Fort Worth’s favorite phrase, because it’s far from what we bargained for when leaders sold everybody on their grandiose ideas.

Their separate failures are disappointing, costly and more than a little sad. Before this ends, close to $100 million in taxpayer money will have been squandered, along with a huge amount of political capital.

It’s enough to make you wonder whether we do more harm than good when we roll out the public payola and over-the-top support for big projects.

Four years ago, the college district unveiled its design for a campus on both sides of the Trinity River, connected by a wide pedestrian bridge. The vision of Vancouver architect Bing Thom bowled over the TCC board and many others, including yours truly.

"It’s the kind of architecture," I wrote at the time, "that makes you shake your head and say, 'Can they really do that?’ "

TCC wanted to reinvent the notion of a junior college and make the facility a source of inspiration as well as education. The district was also willing to shoulder the costs for things that would benefit more than just its students.

The school’s gateway to the river would be a welcome ramp for all visitors, and the bridge was to be a symbolic and literal connection between downtown Fort Worth’s two societies.

That won’t be happening.

"It’s a reason why my heart aches a little bit," Chancellor Leonardo de la Garza said Tuesday.

It’s not all grim, because the district stumbled upon a fortuitous alternative. Who would have imagined that RadioShack, not long after building its own gleaming headquarters on the Trinity, would be willing to walk away completely?

I guess $96 million in local tax breaks doesn’t buy what it used to.

In the RadioShack corporate campus, TCC gets first-class space with a great finish-out, so students are likely to be impressed. Classes will begin much sooner, given that the complex only has to be retrofitted, not built from scratch.

For the city’s ambience, the student activity will be a godsend to a place that has become a dead zone; it’s practically empty around RadioShack all day, and the company locks the front door and directs visitors through the garage.

Perhaps most important for TCC, the RadioShack price is fixed, with no more surprises.

For the past three years, spending on the downtown campus has spiraled out of control. Much of the problem is directed at Hurricane Katrina, a disaster that led to tougher standards for every project that penetrated a flood levee, including the TCC bridge crucial to Thom’s design.

Ultimately, cost control rests with the school district and its partners, Thom and Gideon Toal, the local architectural and planning firm involved from the start. Pick your scapegoat, because there’s plenty of blame to go around.

Best evidence: TCC expects to spend $170 million on the structure under construction in the central business district, which totals about 148,000 square feet. For RadioShack’s campus, it’s paying $238 million for roughly 1 million square feet, plus 2,000 parking spaces.

In other words, RadioShack is a bargain and TCC’s campus is a boondoggle.

TCC’s project includes tens of millions of dollars in "soft costs," such as engineering and architecture fees. Those would have been spread over the rest of the campus, presumably lowering the costs for the next stages. Still, it’s real money — and makes you wonder whether some fees ought to be contingent on getting the deal done.

What good is a great design if it can’t be built close to budget?

The project should have had an alternative path that didn’t hinge on the approval of the Army Corps of Engineers, the agency that controls the levees and, in effect, controlled the project’s timing.

TCC thought that wouldn’t be a problem, but then Katrina hit. If it had had a Plan B, it could have pursued building on both sides and waited patiently, if necessary, for the bridge approval. I asked de la Garza if that was the biggest mistake.

"If I’d known then what I know now, the answer would be a resounding 'Yes,’ " he said.

This isn’t just a matter of hindsight being 20-20. Thom, for one, worried that if the bridge wasn’t built with the rest of the project, it might never get done. In de la Garza, he had a soul mate who shared his passion, and together they held firm.

In the end, they lost the baby with the bath water.