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 - Subscribe  - Contact Us  - Rate Card  - Place an Ad Archives      Revels      Classifieds      Real Estate      Menu Guide      Wedding      Weather      Subscribe      Contact Us March 25, 2005 Downtown off to bad start By John Stromberg Ashland It's time for the city administrator, the mayor, the council and we residents to pull our socks up and get the downtown planning process on the right track. At the moment it is floundering because: o It has a faulty premise - Combining the 1988 vision with the 2001 update is absurdly insufficient for the needs of Ashland in 2005. o It is unfair to the planning department and a setup for failure - No city assigns a complex task such as the downtown plan to an already heavily burdened in house department. We need professional outside expertise and experience in a variety of areas in order to pull off this challenging task. o The damage has been done - The community turned out in unprecedented numbers for the first session of the current process and expressed a rich and complex perspective of downtown, which was dumbed down through a series of filters until a tiny fraction of the ideas were included in a checkoff sheet at the second session. This event then turned into a complaint session by downtown business owners about non-existent plans to take away their parking and delivery spaces and turn over downtown to undesirables. This was a terrible waste of the community's initial enthusiasm and sewed the seeds of mistrust in the planning process. o A vision is not a laundry list - Merely collecting ideas doesn't constitute cultivating a vision for downtown. Andrew Scot Bolsinger's phrase, "The entire ethos of the city is a delicate balance....the qualities that make the city the mystical theatrical place it is..." shows how much producing a vision is a community quest rather than a product to be cranked out. Our process needs to build trust and enable participants to enter into each others' realities if we're to find a living vision that can be a foundation for all that follows. o Vacuum planning - As things stand developers are having to generate their own downtown planning (see, for example, the Copeland property project) because there is no overall concept of what should be going on in downtown and its surrounding areas to guide them. o Economic analysis - Among the most important elements that need to be considered in providing for the future of downtown is how to encourage the success and longevity of the downtown businesses, not only on an individual basis but as an economic community. This requires specialized expertise and experience and has to be a top requirement for whatever group tackles the plan. So, there's a lot at stake. We've stumbled coming out of the gate but that was partly due to the direction given by the previous council. Now it's time for this council to step up and get the show on the road. Let's do it together - this town deserves nothing less. DailyTidings.com Home Page Archives | Revels | Classifieds | Real Estate Guide | Weather | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2005 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Deep Muscle Stimulator Ceramic Piggy Banks FREE Entertainment Guide Women's & Men's Slippers Accelerate Weightloss Products Backpacks Online Pharmacy Vegas Travel Guide Search Engine Optimization Student Loans Hotel & Airline Reservations Hammocks Water Filter Helzberg Diamonds Online Casinos Community Bonus Casino Mortgage Calculator Security Systems Mailing Lists Click Here Advertisement .:Advertisements:. Site Search: RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams