The City Council approved the Rio Nuevo project, which includes museums, shops, theaters and housing centered on 62 acres of city land at Interstate 10 and West Congress Street. The sprawling project, which follows some waterways, would extend more than 10 miles, from the freeway to the other side of downtown. The project would be built over a 20-year period.

In last night's vote, the City Council approved the master plan for the redevelopment project, and will now go about choosing specific projects to begin work on and drafting financial guidelines to entice private developers to build projects within the Rio Nuevo area. The city will also order detailed engineering studies and begin working with adjacent neighborhoods on the impact the development might have on them. Selection of projects that will be included in Rio Nuevo could begin within three months.

A rough outline of the project was approved by local voters in 1999, and engineers and designers have been working on more specific details since then. For the past month, the plan has received some criticism because the overall cost has more than doubled from the original $320 million estimate. But city planners and other proponents say that the tax dollars that residents will put into the project--$120 million between state sales taxes and matching city funds--will increase by only about 11%. Residents are being asked to make an additional investment of just $13.2 million over the first 10 years of the project, mostly for road improvements in downtown, says Rio Nuevo Project Manager John Jones.

The estimated $757-million total project cost includes $168 million in downtown public projects that were not envisioned in the first proposal. However, those projects are already funded, either through city, state or federal sources.

A majority of the Rio Nuevo plan would be built by private developers, who either through tax incentives or other inducements, would be lured to build certain projects there. The private investment portion of the project is estimated to be $408 million, up from the $240 million estimate in the initial draft.

Local developer and chairman of the citizen's advisory committee for Rio Nuevo, Chris Sheafe, stressed to the council that what they approved was not a budget but a design vision.

The council voted in February to delay a final vote on the project until they had received recommendations from the citizen's committee and a facilities district board, which was created to attract private investment to the project. The committee recommended the master plan March 7, and the district board approved it a week later.

As envisioned, the project will include a 20-acre cultural park, two hotels, up to 3,000 parking spaces, a 125,000-sf amphitheater, a 60,000-sf aquarium, 1,750 residential units, up to 500,000 sf of office space and 750,000 sf of retail space.

Rio Nuevo is focused on three parts of the downtown area, at the base of "A" Mountain, north along the Santa Cruz River Walkway and then into downtown. West of Interstate 10 would include a 20-acre cultural park, a 75,000-sf visitor's center, the 100,000-sf amphitheater, an open-air market area, up to 700,000-sf of residential space and 100,000-sf of commercial and retail space.