Wednesday morning’s Rise and Revitalize, Re/New DeKalb meeting was held in the DeKalb City Council chambers. An anticipated large turnout of downtown business owners came to fruition due to the topic of upcoming construction on both Lincoln Hwy and Locust Streets.
The timing of the projects was the main topic of discussion. Work on the Pedestrian Passthru is expected to begin in the Spring. Work along Lincoln Hwy will include sidewalk replacement, benches, lighting and landscaping and is expected to take four months. Lincoln Hwy will not be closed during the construction. Most business owners appeared to favor waiting until June 2010 to tear up the downtown sidewalks along Lincoln Hwy citing the importance of the month of May (Mother’s Day and Graduations) for their businesses.
The Locust Street project was initially planned for 2011 but the City and Re/New DeKalb asked for input on moving that project up. Planned work on Locust Street includes burying of overhead utilities, roadway and sideway replacement and landscaping.
To a question related to the need for burying utilities on Locust St, Re:New DeKalb President Frank Roberts pointed to the architect’s drawings and wondered if the project would look right with the utility poles still in place. He also emphasized the need to get the project done before the ‘atmosphere changed’ and the money was not available.
The need to keep Second and Third Street intersections with Locust open during construction was also discussed. Access is needed for businesses along the first block North of Lincoln Hwy since those streets are both one-way.
The issue will be brought up at next Monday’s City Council meeting, where the group will ask for the funds to begin the engineering work for Locust St. If the Lincoln Hwy. project is completed in time, they would like to do preliminary work on Locust Street in the Fall of 2010. The plan would be to open Locust Street during the Winter and restart the project in the Spring of 2011. Work on Locust Street is expected to take a total of six months.
Not enough time was allowed for the meeting to discuss the Locust Street timing among the business owners so another meeting will be scheduled in the near future.
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4 Comments
People were asking about the price of pavers vs. stamped concrete and nobody mentioned until last night the 3rd option, which is stamped asphalt. Is that what they have at Glidden Crossing, btw? It is plenty attractive.
Also, either Monas' memory is failing or he lied last night about the Van Buer parking lot not being done in time to be plowed last winter. They got most of it done in November and it was plowed plenty. (By springtime the curbs inside the lot were a shambles.) What would be the point of fudging on this?
Trees and streetlights do not mix well in this design. They may as well skip the streetlights and pass out free flashlights (and baseball bats) to everyone. They continue to pay Hitchcock and Hansen thousands every month to develop this stuff.
The design is a mugger's delight.
Interesting story Gracie. I especially like Frank Robert's comment about getting it done while the cimate is still favorable. Is he referring to peoples general feeling towards TIF? The general publics feeling of the entire project especially when it comes to the wasteful spending of tax dollars just because we have them? Is the climate Mr. Roberts refers to the city council and majority voting?
Elections for wards one, three, five and seven are less than 15 months away and there is certainly to be a change in the councils "climate" wouldn't you think?
As for Locust and Lincoln being done together, this will literally kill some of the businesses downtown and definitely hurt the flow of traffic needed to move people and their vehicles around downtown. I am wondering how the work on the sidewalks and curbs will not affect what will be a newly repaved Lincoln Hwy. There will certainly be work that carries out into Lincoln Hwy and will just look awful having everything else all brand spanking new and the road with a bunch of patched repairs. Maybe they'll just regrind the surface down and redo the paving since the money seems to be ample within the TIF accounts.
One point is certain however. If they are streamlining and beautifying the downtown, the utility lines should be put underground. If money is going to be spent on this project it might as well have things done correctly unlike the use of pavers.
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Oops, I mean they got most of it done BY November.