The ongoing saga of City Hall Plaza continues. After weeks of pressure from green space advocates, landscape architects, nearby residents, the media and city councilors, the Boston Redevelopment Authority and the Trust for City Hall Plaza have begun to relent. There is now a real possibility that Boston can focus on its real objective for the plaza — creating a successful and vibrant public space for all of Boston’s citizens.

Begun with high hopes three years ago, the threefold purpose of the redesign effort was, to paraphrase BRA director Thomas O’Brien,

• to preserve the civic space of the plaza,
• to make the plaza a destination space, one people would come to rather than simply traverse, and
• to make it an exciting place, with myriad events and programs that would keep visitors in the plaza.

Excited by the prospects for the hotel, the trust forged ahead, finding a site for the new hotel, sketching out preliminary plans and conducting a competition out of which it selected — and the BRA approved — a developer. Suddenly a hotel was born. Located between the federal buildings to the north of the plaza and city hall itself, the new hotel would effectively shrink the plaza by over 40%.

But wait. The major use of City Hall Plaza proposed by the trust had now become a hotel. Suddenly the means for saving the plaza had become an end unto itself. The trust had committed a classic error of confusing means and ends, of allowing its preoccupation with how to pay for the plaza’s revitalization to undermine the plaza itself.

After much complaint, the BRA has now agreed to the creation of a Citizens Advisory Committee to review the whole process. It also has acknowledged that the City Council will need to play a formal role in the process, and has agreed to be bound by a Council vote on the whole planning process for the plaza.

All that is to the good. Here’s where we need to go from here.

First, we should begin by figuring out, without regard to money, what we want the plaza to become. The CAC and the trust need to develop a solid and workable master plan for the entire plaza. Only after that should we then begin to figure out how to pay for it. Sources of funding include grants from abutters, including the GSA, funding from the city, state and federal government, funding from the development of properties off the plaza (something that no one has explored) and self-generated funding from proposed uses on-site.

It very well may be that, in the end, the issue of how to pay for the improvements causes us to modify the plans for the plaza. But surely it is better to approach the problem this way than to allow funding concerns to dictate our use of the space. It is simply not credible that to save the plaza we need to kill it.