March 2, 2005, City Council finalizes $300,000 allocation for Cleveland Cascade

The City Council seals the deal!

The City Council voted by consensus to approve the element of Measure DD funding that allocates $300,000 to the restoration of the Cleveland Cascade!

Thanks to all of you for your recent emails and calls to council members Brunner, De La Fuente, and Reid. (Thanks, too, to council member Nancy Nadel who has been so consistently supportive that we didn’t need to lobby her!) See “March 1, 2005, Seal the deal for the Cleveland Cascade’s $300,000.”

And thanks to all of you who lobbied the Life Enrichment committee with your emails, calls, and presence earlier this month. (See “February 8, 2005, City Hall meeting crucial for Cleveland Cascade”) And thanks to all of you who have come to the Cascade to help since we first began this ambitious undertaking last May.

(If you were watching the city-council proceedings on KTOP, they became procedurally somewhat complicated for reasons having nothing to do with the Cascade, but rather which concerned $900,000 for increased fire-protection infrastructure in Lakeside Park. That portion was held back for further discussion with the Measure DD Community Coalition. Don’t worry... that complication did not prevent the Council's approving the Cascade allocation.)

Movin’ forward

Now the fun can really begin. Already the very generous folks at the local landscape architecture firm PGA Design are taking a leadership role to put together a design team.

The $300,000 does not belong to Friends of the Cleveland Cascade (FOCC). It is money that the City will administer in consultation and cooperation with FOCC. The $300,000 also will NOT be enough to do the whole job. We will have to raise additional money to supplement the Measure DD contribution. We’ll soon be meeting with very helpful folks in the City (CEDA and Public Works) to plan the most efficient collaboration between our private efforts and the City’s.

As the design process unfolds, we’ll get a better idea of how much of a funding shortfall we need to fill. Once we have a reliable target, we’ll launch a major capital campaign to take the Cascade’s restoration all the way home.

To support all the new activities we need to engage in, we’ll soon be be ramping up a much broader Friends of the Cleveland Cascade to do outreach, planning, fundraising, publicity, etc. If you’d like to get involved in this expanded organization, please email us!

Help us meet our challenge grant!

Until we launch this major capital campaign, we do have a very important short-run fundraising goal. A local family foundation, the De Long-Sweet Foundation, has very generously given us a "challenge grant" of $32,500.

To earn that grant, however, we need to match it with money we separately raise. (That's the “challenge” part.) We've already raised $12,500 toward that goal, so we have $20,000 more to go. In other words, if we raise an additional $20,000, that $20,000 will turn into over $50,000!