No Matter How You Feel About UGB, Vote For Me !

By John Kenneth Dorwin

Why we need to finish The 2002 Urban Design Plan

The devil is in the details. How do we provide enough parking for what gets built in the downtown ? Who is going to pay for these improvements, and how ? I see the need for impact studies and mitigation fees to get the process restarted . We have had some great staff who, like Helen Travis have moved the process forward as to the medians and the Avenue improvements. We need to adopt this type of project manager process to seethe Urban Design Plan move forward. With the current credit crunch, we are going to have some time to plan for the future in the next several years. I want to see quality projects for downtown, and to see them done correctly. The most recent project on the Avenue remains largely vacant today. Why is that ? Is it because there is no elevator to the third floor ? Or is it because there is not enough parking for both the residential and commercial portions of the Project ? This experiment is not working . We should learn why and adjust our project design criteria according to what we learn from both our successful programs and the ones we could have improved upon.

We have a good General Plan. We need to anticipate what we can do and establish a new set of priorities. The City has infrastructure needs which we should take the time to address as part of the current 2025 General Plan process. The UGB helps us do that by putting the community focus back on the General Plan and building out what we have started to do over the last 16 years. The Avenue of the Flags was dedicated in 1968. It has been forty years since the State gave us this Downtown opportunity. We need to get back to the Avenue so that by 2025 we can all say the plan is on a solid foundation and we are in sight of our goals.