Asheville Downtown Master Plan – Hope And Reservations
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I had the pleasure of attending a Q&A with Jenny Bowen tonight at Firestorm regarding the third draft of the Asheville Downtown Master Plan. While I’m hardly an expert on the plan, a few things about it became eminently clear over the course of our discussion and my review of the draft.
(If you’d rather skip my opinions and just read the thing, click here and get to reading)
There are a lot of good ideas in this draft. It was refreshing to see many concepts regarding transportation, sustainability, localism, housing, development, arts, and culture written into a plan at all. Many of the ideas, however, are woefully short on specifics. All of the ideas are dependent on the creation of a new management entity that the draft says “must transcend election cycles”. The new entity with the snappy acronym A.D.D. has far too much power for an appointed body without oversight or accountability.
We need many of the plan’s good ideas codified in a revised UDO and implemented by an elected body such as City Council. However, as it stands, the structure is a petri dish for corruption and mismanagement.
On Thursday night there will be opportunity for public comment at the Civic Center from 7-9pm. Be there if you want to have any input into this stage of the process.
I’m going to have a lot more to say about this, and I hope you will too. Stay tuned.
5 Comments
January 12th, 2009 at 7:46 am
While I agree that many of the ideas seem useful, I have significant reservations about both the underlying premises and the detailed recommendations that flow from it.
In the big picture, the plan assumes a tourism future that resembles the past only more so. Wrong. We are looking at a recession (some would say depression) that will endure for at least the next three years (according to Obama’s main economic advisers) and then continue to face both global climate change issues and post-peak oil. Tourism will not again be what it once was for this region.
In this light, it’s interesting to see how the plan has evolved over the past year (although it is still playing catch up.) Last year we were told that Asheville was poised for ever more growth, with ten or fifteen years ahead of us that looked bright and sunny. Now the plan starts out acknowledging the current economic slump … but then embraces the illusion that it will all be fixed in a short while.
As to details: Why does the plan suggest that low elevations are best for tall buildings but then advocate an exception on Battery Hill? Could it be that they have made room in the plan for Fraga and McKinnon? (Both developers want to build high rise buildings in the Arcade/Battery vicinity.)
Why does the plan call for an additional management entity with separate offices, staff and funding? Doesn’t that work fall under the responsibility of the city planning department?
Why are we going to either add taxes on downtown properties/businesses, or divert part of current spending, and then hand part of that money to the Tourism Board? Most people I have spoken with in this city believe we have been growing too fast. Do we really want to spend more money advertising for newbies? It would make more sense to divert money currently going to the Tourism Board to investment in local green jobs, to build the local economy so it can better weather the pending economic shift.
And again taking an overall view—my impression after careful reading of the plan in recent weeks is that there isn’t actually a whole lot of there there. Lots of glowing ideas, but not much concrete in terms of shaping development in the city. It is full of “this District could have a gateway here, and that District could have a focal point there …” And the transit ideas (downtown shuttles, auto-free days on weekends, etc.) have been talked about for at least a decade by folks here with vision.
I seriously question the expenditure of city funds to hire consultants who are now telling us what we already knew.
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January 12th, 2009 at 9:44 am
Thank you Gordon, & others, for joining me yester evening.
I feel good going into this DTMP advisory meeting this morning, I will report back after & we’ll see what develops.
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January 12th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
In Peoplepowergranny.blogspot.com I post my concerns about a new Downtown Master Plan that will be available for comment in a couple nights. Are leaders accountable to voters? Vote in my poll and let me know what kind of a master plan would make your downtown better. Or is one needed at all?
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January 13th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Well said Cecil. While Im viewing the silver lining aspect of this, being many of the proposed building monstrosities in downtown arent going to happen, now what?
Less industry than there was 10 years ago.
The media talent in this town is amazing, but frankly fractured.
Another “yuppie moving here to open thier dream resteraunt, has no idea what thier doing, falls flat on thier face” story is good snarky drinking conversation, but dosent exactly promote job growth.
Love this town, fear for it’s future.
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January 13th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
I agree with Gordon and Cecil. At least one member of the group that drafted the plan has serious conflict of interest issues, and I don’t want anything that resembles taxation without representation. We have that already with the TDA and it has not worked out for everyone (except those whose jobs are propped up by the funding).
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