This past Saturday, September 12, thousands of people walked Main Street for the 13th annual Tigard Street Fair, weaving between vendor booths and the beer garden with barely a thought for the ground under their feet. Some of that ground, the stretch of boardwalk where Main Street crosses Fanno Creek, is rotting. The city knows it. The mayor bikes over it and says so out loud. And as of this year, fixing it is exactly where Tigard decided to put its money instead of building a new public plaza a few dozen feet away.
If you only read the headline, that sounds like downtown Tigard is retreating. A planned civic space, the Nick Wilson Memorial Plaza, got shelved by the Town Center Development Agency back in February. But look at where the money actually went, and the story flips. Tigard didn't choose to do less downtown. It chose to spend on the parts of Fanno Creek Trail that residents already touch every day, rather than build something new next to it.
What Got Cut, and What It Would Have Cost
The plaza was never meant to be huge. Roughly 6,000 square feet, tucked into an easement next to Cooper Mountain Ale Works on Main Street, with a trail connection to Fanno Creek. The city had already spent $323,000 acquiring the property and easement, plus another $214,000 getting the design 30 percent finished. That's $537,000 in before construction even began. City staff estimated it would take another $1.6 million to actually build the thing.
Add it up and a small plaza next to a brewpub was on track to cost more than $2 million.
Compare that to the $640,000 the city is now committing to Fanno Creek Trail itself: widening the Main Street crossing so it's easier to navigate for cyclists and residents with mobility devices, resurfacing the aging boardwalk and pedestrian bridge, adding decorative railings, and replanting native species along both creek banks. One project would have served a plaza. The other serves the trail everyone already uses to get from the library to the farmers market to Main Street's restaurants. The second project costs less than a third of what the first would have, and reaches a lot more people on a lot more days of the year.
Sean Farrelly, the city's redevelopment project manager, laid this out for the council in a February update, and it's worth noting the choice wasn't really "plaza versus nothing." Tigard didn't cancel the space, it deferred it, and the city still owns the land in case the idea gets revisited later. What moved to the front of the line instead was infrastructure people are already standing on.
The Boardwalk Itself
The numbers here are small enough to picture. The boardwalk that connects the two halves of Fanno Creek Trail through downtown is about 160 feet long. The pedestrian bridge that crosses the creek is another 90 feet. Both are old enough that large sections have already been patched with asphalt just to keep people from slipping. The plan now is to strip the aging wood decking and replace it with fiberglass, which holds up better in the rain that defines about eight months of the Tigard calendar.
Mayor Yi-Kang Hu didn't need a staff report to make the case for this one. He told the council he walks and bikes the trail himself, and that the deck needs replacing. That's not a hypothetical resident being cited in a planning document. That's the mayor describing his own commute.
The upgrades also include decorative metal railings on both sides of the Main Street bridge, a commemorative bench near the boardwalk's opening, and restoration work along the creek, pulling invasive plants and putting in native species instead. None of this shows up on a ribbon-cutting the way a plaza would. All of it is the kind of maintenance that decides whether a trail feels cared for or just old.
Why the Memorial Landed Here Instead
The plaza was named for Nick Wilson, a Tigard city councilor from 2002 to 2012 who died in 2020. His landscape architecture firm sat directly above what's now Cooper Mountain Ale Works, overlooking the same stretch of Fanno Creek Trail the boardwalk repairs will touch. A standalone plaza named after him would have been a nice gesture. A repaired boardwalk and a bench positioned right where he used to look out over the water is arguably a more literal one.
That's not really a coincidence so much as a byproduct of how the city ended up prioritizing. When the stakeholder feedback came in on the original plaza design, some of it raised concerns about construction impacts on a small footprint, and some questioned whether a limited public space was the best use of tax increment financing dollars downtown. The alternative that emerged wasn't a smaller plaza. It was redirecting toward trail infrastructure that touches the same corridor, just without the standalone structure.
The Part That Already Happened This Year
Some of this is not hypothetical anymore. Fanno Creek Trail closed for three days in June, from the 16th through the 18th, between Grant Avenue and Main Street, so crews could work on the Grant Avenue segment and install new ADA ramps. Anyone who uses that stretch regularly had to detour through Johnson Street or the Tigard Street Heritage Trail for those three days. It was a small closure, but it's evidence the money is moving into actual construction rather than sitting in a line item waiting for a future budget cycle.
That detail matters if you live near downtown and rely on the trail to get to the library, to Fanno Creek Park, or over to Main Street's restaurants and shops. The work is proceeding in pieces, not all at once, which means more short closures are likely as the boardwalk and bridge resurfacing move forward.
What This Says About How Downtown Tigard Actually Grows
Main Street's two blockbuster annual events, the Tigard Street Fair and the Tigard Art Walk, both close the street entirely and rely on that same short stretch between Fanno Creek and the railroad crossing to draw people in. The businesses that anchor it are specific and small. Cooper Mountain Ale Works brews its own beer on-site at a 10-barrel house right on Main Street and hosts live music through the year. A block down, Symposium Coffee sits on Rotary Plaza with a patio that fills up before the farmers market even opens. Curiosities Vintage & Oddities sits right along the boardwalk that's about to get rebuilt.
None of these businesses needed a plaza to draw foot traffic. What they need is a corridor that people can actually walk without worrying about a soft plank or a slick patch of asphalt. That's the quieter argument buried in this whole episode. Tigard's downtown isn't being built through single, visible civic projects. It's being built through a slow accumulation of fixes to the infrastructure that's already there, funded in increments as the money becomes available, prioritized around what residents are already doing every day rather than what would look best in a rendering.
If you live near Main Street or use Fanno Creek Trail on any kind of regular basis, that's worth knowing heading into fall. Expect more short, localized closures as the boardwalk and bridge work continues. Expect the crossing at Main Street to get wider and safer before it gets prettier. And if you're at the Street Fair or the Art Walk next spring, you'll likely be standing on ground that was, not too long before, one of downtown's more overdue repair jobs.
That's not a smaller story than a new plaza would have been. It's just a story that plays out underfoot instead of on a plaque.
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