Conference shines spotlight on Streetscape
By Ethan Smith and Melinda Harrell
Published in News on March 18, 2016 1:46 PM
The Streetscape project and the city's involvement in revitalizing the downtown area is one of the main focuses of the N.C. Main Street Conference this year.
Hundreds of leaders, including mayors, chamber presidents and members, economic development groups and community volunteers, poured into Center Street Wednesday and Thursday to attend various breakout sessions that are geared to offering instruction on how to make downtowns and main streets more appealing.
Among those professionals offering lectures on how to make downtown and Main streets better were the Goldsboro's Downtown Goldsboro Development Corp. executive director Julie Metz and city manager Scott Stevens. In the council chambers on Wednesday, Stevens and Ms. Metz presented "Planning Gets You Money: Guiding the Implementation of a Shared Vision."
Their presentation was mostly concentrated on how Goldsboro began the planning process for the downtown revitalization 15 years ago and how that planning invariably landed the millions of dollars TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) grant that was funneled into the Streetscape project.
Ms. Metz and Stevens offered a step-by-step process on how planning was able to hook investors into the project.
Ms. Metz said first the plan needed to be on paper, which makes for the first and one of the most vital steps in the planning process.
"A plan is conducted and formatted, it should really be a road map and not something that sits on a shelf," Ms. Metz said.
"It will help guide future decisions and also guide funding needs and apply precious resources effectively. There are always more projects around the community, and those that are well prepared will be the ones that resources are applied to. A plan is essential in that toolbox. A formal, tangible plan shows that you are interested in doing something, you know you are not perfect, but that you are open to improving, and you want to do it. That speaks volumes to investors."
And from that "road map," community involvement is born, which is also a vital tool in the acquisition of funding, said Ms. Metz, for if the public does not buy into the vision, then no one else will.
"You have to have public involvement if you expect anyone to care to get the work done," Ms. Metz said.
"My office makes sure we spend a lot of time making sure we create as many public input and public involvement opportunities as possible. It is really important, for many reasons. Downtown is your public realm. It is where you want your people of all populations to congregate. You have to obviously involve the public and the voice to what you want. You need the public buy-in. Just me going before the council and saying we need $7.8 million to do Streetscape doesn't urge them to do so. It's the masses of people and once you have the public buy-in, that will help support these projects."
Ms. Metz said public support is an important aspect to seeing a planning project, like Streetscape, come to fruition, but another caveat to useful planning is including a variety of people giving input.
"And I will say, when you are doing your public involvement, don't just be speaking to the choir, you really need to reach out across your community and not just to your typical partners or supporters in the downtown effort," she said.
Ms. Metz said that the variety of input the city and DGDC gathered resulted in the sculptures that rest in the roundabouts and along Center Street.
"If I would have talked to my traditional downtown board members, we wouldn't have had the funky public art in the center medians," she said.
"Embracing the diversity in our community and bringing them to the table created a much more interesting result."
Though Stevens and Metz said they gathered outside input from a variety of different population groups, they were also quick to say that the decision of the art type was not completely well received, and advised conference attendees to be prepared for criticism.
"We assembled a committee at the arts council to go through public art selection process," Stevens said.
"We had a group narrow it down to a few. We put that out on Facebook to have folks comment and give us their opinion. We were trying to get public buy-in for the art Allison (Platt), Julie and I have lived through it. I will tell you today it worked, but when we first installed the art downtown, people on one side hated it, and people on this side loved it, and I think more people now have moved over to love it, but we are going to make those people mad in October because we are going to switch it out."
They said another valuable step in planning is making connections with those in the state that can help gain funding.
"For the last 15 years, we talk about the activities and events, but anytime we had an opportunity to celebrate our Union Station, to celebrate our downtown, to pull groups together, we have had our secretaries through the department of transportation, we have had our congressman visit," he said.
"We have probably had our congressman visit a half a dozen times talking about the Streetscape or Union Station. We take annual trips to D.C. to talk to our congressional delegation and their staffers. I don't know if any of that works or matters, but I think it all made little impacts at the end of the day in achieving the TIGER grants."
Effective planning also includes providing a visual aspect to the plan -- specifically renderings that allow the public to see what they are being asked to support, said Ms. Metz.
"It is the visuals that really stayed true to people and what they held on to," Ms. Metz said.
"People respond to those visuals. We started to create these visuals and show them on Facebook and throughout city hall and in our office. We share them, any time we try to solicit investors these images are up there."
Stevens did offer a word of caution with the visual renderings however, citing the fountain visual that was designed originally for Center Street in the renderings were different than the water feature that was actually placed there.
"You have to be careful of what picture you draw because then people expect that picture," Stevens said.
Ms. Metz said in the planning process, with visuals, it is important to clarify in the master plan what is simply an idea or concept over a design decision that is set in stone.
Streetscape's renderings as well as the construction process and financing were also discussed Thursday in the break out session "Redesigning Main Street -- Understanding the Streetscape Redesign Process," with Ms. Metz returning as a presenter, along with urban designer Allison Platt and professional engineer with the Wooten Company Fred Rash, to cover the nuts and bolts of the work the went into Goldsboro's $16.1 million Streetscape project.
"You need to build for the next 100 years, and that's why you want to replace that infrastructure," Ms. Platt said.
Streetscape projects are meant to express the character and heart of your community, she said, and express something unique about the community.
"It shouldn't just be a street. It should be the heart of your community and the expression of your character," Ms. Platt said.
Another thing that occurred with Goldsboro's Streetscape was allowing for variety within a framework of the overall project. This means beginning with a structure that will enable you to move forward with the idea of the project, while also allowing wiggle room to change things, if necessary, along the way.
The city knew the framework of what it wanted -- a wide, walkable median, shade trees, better sidewalks and more -- and went from there.
Renderings were made of what could develop downtown and shown to the public, which included renderings of a fountain, a clock tower and traffic lights installed on boom-style arms.
Along the way, these renderings were changed as they headed towards construction. The clock tower never came to be, the featureless water fixture in the conceptual rendering of the fountain took the shape of a city skyline and traffic lights were scrapped in favor of roundabouts due to the high-cost of traffic lights being unrealistic and roundabouts allowing for a better flow of traffic.
"This was the image that Eric (Hyne, Ms. Platt's business partner) drew of what it could look like, before and after," Ms. Platt said. "And that image stayed very strongly in people's mind while we were aiming towards doing these improvements. And in fact, many people, when we came up with a proposal for a fountain, they wanted it to look just like that one (shown in the original conceptual drawings). So, we had to have a little go around about that."
And while public input meetings were held along the way in the run-up to breaking ground on the Streetscape project, it became much more difficult to have public input meetings once construction drawings started getting sketched out.
"We had a lot of public meetings at the very beginning, and keep in mind that if you want to do a Streetscape that it's great to have these discussions about public involvement...you have to have it," Ms. Platt said. "But you can only have it up to a certain point when you do construction drawings. When you have that many -- that level of detail on how you build it and what the control dimensions are and so on -- you can't change your mind about what the layout's going to be when you're doing construction."
But behind the scenes -- the nuts and bolts of what allows downtown to tick along a newly revamped street -- much more was going on.
Everything for the Streetscape project used for construction and utility replacement had to be made in America. There were only a few exceptions to this rule, such as the valves for the fountain and steel used during the project. These exceptions were made because the valves necessary for the fountain are only made in Canada, and the Federal Transit Administration, who oversaw spending for this project, allowed steel form outside the United States to be used.
Rash said figuring out the logistics of the drainage and location of utilities downtown was an immense challenge during Streetscape. The downtown area had a very slight grade, and all of it dumped towards one area. The above-ground utilities all connected on the tops and sides of the buildings downtown, making figuring out how to put the power lines below-ground tricky.
To solve the drainage problem, the architects were allowed to tie directly into the city's storm drainage system, Rash said, solving the problem of how to fix the street drainage problem without creating a severe disturbance to downtown businesses.
But regardless of any bumps or bruises or hiccups along the way, Goldsboro's Streetscape project -- two phases of it, at least -- is done.
One of the major keys to Goldsboro's success was being "shovel-ready" following the city's planning phase of the project, which enabled the city to receive TIGER V grant funding.
This funding paid for $10 million of the project, while the city provided a local match of $3.5 million, received a Federal Transit Administration grant for $1.5 million and then allocated $306,284 from the city's utility fund.
More than half of the cost of this multimillion-dollar project was in just infrastructure. Goldsboro invested in upgrading water and sewer lines, placing its utilities underground and more.
Since making the investment and the beginning of the first phase in 2010, 49 new businesses have opened downtown, 15 homes that were in condemnation proceedings were purchased, 23 people have become new property or business owners downtown, Goldsboro won a "Great Main Street in the Making" award in 2015 and there is a possible $10 million to $15 million mixed-use retail and living project under discussion for the downtown area.