Three riverfront greenways on the city’s west side will take 20 years or more to realize and could cost $93 million if every dream for them comes to pass.

The greenways concept and cost projections were endorsed this week by the City Council, completing a nine-month planning and public-input process led by urban design firm Confluence.

“I hope I live long enough to see this and enjoy it,” City Council member Ann Poe, 62, said at Tuesday evening’s council meeting.

The three greenways are a 72.2-acre area called Time Check Park; a 22-acre area called Riverfront Park that stretches along the river from Time Check Park through Kingston Village; and a 39.7-acre area called Czech Village Park below the Czech Village commercial district.

Poe encouraged Sven Leff, the city’s Parks and Recreation director and the Confluence designers, to incorporate an art element into the Time Check Park greenway that memorializes all of the neighborhood homes lost to the 2008 flood.

The Confluence plan envisions pavilions in the Time Check and Czech Village parks. Council member Monica Vernon said she would like to see the city seek design proposals so the pavilions reflect the neighborhoods around the parks and are not something the city “just slaps up.”

The greenways’ concept calls for a riverfront trail to connect the three greenway parks, and Vernon said she wanted to see the trail go under the city’s bridges so trail users don’t have to wait for traffic.

She said she could imagine a half-marathon road race on the city’s both-sides-of-the-river trail system.

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