The parks board and city staff last night — back from the ol’ drawing board — presented the revised master plan to light White Rock Lake and many of you were there — in fact a hundred or so folks crammed into the hot meeting room at Winfrey Point.
The plan can be viewed in full here, but here are a few highlights: The ultimate goal, representatives say, is to provide very minimal lighting without leaving runners, cyclists and dog walkers completely in the dark. The plan calls for extra lighting in certain areas, such as Winfrey Point during events only; for the the trail to be lit only in designated spots — near curves, intersections, parking lots, piers and areas with highest potential for high traffic and collisions. The parks board and police will continue to assess the situation at the lake and, with continued input from the White Rock Task Force and neighborhood groups, make updates and ammendments to the plan as needed. All lights will be “the color of moonlight, low intensity and downward facing. The first phase which is already funded, will include the spillway area and removing old non-conforming lights. The old lights could be sold to another district.
Some runners feel they were underrepresented on the White Rock Task Force, a group that heavily influenced this comprehensive lake-lighting design. You can hear some of their frustration voiced on the video following the jump. Afterward, Chris Stratton, who spoke on behalf of the Dallas Running Club, told me that, despite his respectful request for further consideration of the plan, he has generally supported the city’s park improvement and lighting plans all along, voted for it when the White Rock Lake master plan was originally adopted back in 2004, and feels the city has come a long way in developing a strategy to responsibly place lighting at the lake. Stratton and many of his running peers still feel that more significant lighting along the darkest areas of the trail is necessary to ensure safety for the thousands of runners who use the lake.
