About 70 people packed the Cowlitz PUD auditorium Wednesday night to consider how Longview’s R.A. Long Park and the surrounding traffic circle will look in the future, the first step in creating a long-term plan for the Civic Center.

“A fundamental part of the planning process is making darned sure you know what you want to keep,” said Michael Sullivan, a consultant with Artifacts Architectural Consulting of Tacoma.

The city of Longview, which is planning to renovate the aging park, hosted Wednesday’s public workshop to get the community’s feedback on how to enhance the park’s beauty and increase its usage. Because the park improvements could affect the traffic circle, the city also wants citizens’ opinions on traffic flow changes aimed at improving pedestrian safety and reducing car accidents.

Armed with old photos, Sullivan walked the audience through the history of the park, which was built in 1923 as the hub of R.A. Long’s planned city. The park’s original configuration of sidewalks and concrete platforms remains intact, but over the years, the trees have grown huge, and several stone and bronze monuments, benches, mail boxes and ballot boxes have been placed in the park’s boundaries.

Sullivan said workshop participants would be asked to consider what in the park was “character defining” and what blurs the park’s original intent. Brian Bishop, a landscape architect from GGLO, LLC of Seattle, suggested ways to make the park a destination, such as adding fountains, flower beds and game courts.

Transpo Group traffic consultants also showed three different traffic concepts that included roundabouts at each corner of the Civic Center, local access lanes and more visible crosswalks. The audience was instructed to think about what they liked and didn’t like but told not to worry about street layout and other specific changes this early in the planning.

After the consultants’ presentations, the audience broke up into workgroups to answer questions about the concepts and offer new ideas. Based on the information gathered Wednesday, consultants will create three more concepts for the traffic flow and three for the park design and present them at a community workshop next month.

The city has a $400,000 federal safety grant for the traffic circle improvements, and $100,000 from the city’s capital projects fund has been budgeted toward park plans and partial construction costs.