San Antonio residents’ preference to drive their cars into Brackenridge Park and unload the supplies they need for a picnic, barbecue or other family gathering will not be threatened by a master plan for the park’s future.

Ideas to close several roads and parking lots throughout the park and replace them with external garages, a circulating tram and a “grand lawn” proved unpopular with most residents who spoke up at six public meetings held over the summer.

On Monday night, a City Council committee voted to strip those ideas from the Brackenridge Park draft master plan.

For many, the debate was much bigger than Brackenridge alone. The 343-acre downtown park came to symbolize the tension between the city’s past and future and the question of exactly who San Antonio’s downtown public spaces exist to serve.

At the meeting of the council’s Neighborhoods and Livability Committee, Ana Ramirez, president of River Road Neighborhood Association, said that removal of parking effectively denied access to the predominately Mexican-American families who are part of the park’s identity.

These users “have kept that park alive as a friendly place for families for many years,” said former Councilwoman Maria Berriozábal, who publicly spoke up for those users after the draft plan was unveiled in April.

“We must work to protect our uniqueness. That’s how we include everybody,” she said.

Esperanza Peace and Justice Center Director Graciela Sanchez spoke in stronger terms. At the meeting, she compared the Brackenridge debate to those over the Hays Street Bridge, Main Plaza and Hemisfair. She said city staff often meets behind closed doors with business interests who want to profit from changes to city’s public spaces.

But those are not the people who have lived here for generations and invested their lives in San Antonio long before the population boom and flurry of downtown development, she said.

“We’re the ones who are invested in San Antonio,” she said. “We love San Antonio. San Antonio is ours.”

Berriozábal thanked the parks department staff and council members for slowing down the planning process and having made it more inclusive. Before those six meetings, the city and the project team made up of Rialto Studio, Work5hop, Alamo Architects, Ford Powell & Carson and the nonprofit Brackenridge Park Conservancy had initially held two public meetings.

Parks staff said 363 people from 59 different ZIP codes attended the six recent meetings. The city had promoted the events with dual-language advertising across most of the local news media, a special webpage and interviews with outlets in English and Spanish.

Committee member District 4 Councilman Rey Saldaña said the city must learn from this experience.

“Whether we want to admit it or not, the city has made mistakes on transparency and inclusion,” and not just with this issue, he said.

Saldana, committee chairman District 1 Councilman Roberto Treviño and District 7 Councilman Cris Medina voted to remove the parking and road closures from the plan. District 6 Councilman Ray Lopez and District 2 Councilman Alan Warrick II were absent for the vote.

While the beefs over parking and the planning process have drawn the most attention, parks department data gathered during the comment period show most sections of the plan have broad support.

The vast majority seemed to agree that the park’s history and natural resources are valuable and worth protecting. Proposals that will remain in the plan are restoration of the banks of the San Antonio River and the concrete-lined ditch of the Catalpa-Pershing Channel, removal of invasive species and use water-filtering low-impact design elements.

So will the slightly less popular but still majority supported plans to create a common park entrance theme, increase the park’s connections to nearby neighborhoods and add multi-use paths, according to the department data.

The public also was interested in seeking official historic designations, restoring the dam and acequia network built by Spanish colonists and the remains of the privately owned waterworks that served the growing city in the late 1800s.

In fact, Brackenridge’s long history stretches in a continuous line from precolonial Native Americans through the Spanish, Mexican and Civil War eras of Texas all the way to the present day. Brackenridge Park Conservancy Director Lynn Osborne Bobbitt compared the park to Alamo Plaza in its historical significance to the city.

“Almost every inch of Brackenridge Park is an archaeologically significant site,” Parks and Recreation Director Xavier Urrutia said. “The history of San Antonio is in that park.”

The plan is a nonbinding vision for the park’s future. The estimated cost of implementing the plan has been $150 million, but that could change. Last week, City Manager Sheryl Sculley and Transportation and Capital Improvements Director Mike Frisbie tentatively proposed $19 million from the city’s upcoming 2017 municipal bond program.

As for parks staff, the next step is to meet among themselves and with the project team to come up with an innovative way to solicit even more public input as they prepare the final master plan, Acting Assistant Director Homer Garcia said. It could include an interactive public event to be held at Brackenridge, he said.

“Whatever we do, it’ll be fun as well,” he said.

bgibbons@express-news.net, Twitter: @bgibbs