Kent 360 - Kent, Ohio

Blog of Dave Ruller, Kent City Manager

“Better Block” Success

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For those of you that didn’t get a chance to swing by the Better Block event on N. Water Street last weekend, below are some images of the event.
 

Attendance was steady throughout the day and the comments were overwhelmingly positive about the future possibilities for redevelopment in the “Mill District.” Here’s a sampling of written comments that we received:

– “It was so much fun to see what we can become!”

– “This event was so well organized it was fun to be part of the planning team.  I am grateful for the opportunity and happy that the timebank was able to participate as well!”

– “Congratulations to everyone for helping make today such a resounding success! We could not have asked for more beautiful weather, and everyone I spoke to was thrilled with the event and what we hope to do with North Water Street to make it more pedestrian friendly and attractive. It remains the last unsolved puzzle piece in the downtown revitalization project. May its future be as bright as we imagined it can one day be!”   

N. Water Street “Better Block” Event

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Progress continues on planning for the N. Water Street Better Block event scheduled to be held on September 29th, so mark your calendars, the one month countdown has begun.

One bonus from all the recent interest in N. Water Street has been the local business owners starting to refer to N. Water Street as the “Mill District.”

Admittedly the Mill is closed but the iconic grain towers aren’t going anywhere soon so the Mill District brand should have plenty of life left in it.

Lots of interesting things gaining momentum in the Mill District — I’m excited to see what ideas will gain traction coming out of the Better Block event.

In the meantime, be sure to check out the Mill District web site that one of the local businesses put together.  Great stuff.

 

 

East Main Street Neighborhood Update

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If you haven’t driven by 1005 East Main Street recently, the new building on the former funeral home property has made a lot of progress this summer.

To my untrained construction eyes, it looks like most of the exterior is wrapping up but there’s still interior work that needs to be done.

At this point, the only tenant that we’re aware of is Starbucks, but there’s room for 2 other small businesses in the building.

I’m grateful that the look of the building, with a mix of brick, siding, lots of glass, and an angular roof line with dormers is attractive, and it seems to strikes a reasonable balance between a commercial and residential feel which is important since it sits on the dividing line between those uses.

When the private developer first announced his plans for the property after he purchased it, there were a lot of concerns raised by the adjacent neighborhood over the prospect of added traffic due to the proposed new Starbucks tenant — particularly since it will have a drive-thru window.

Those concerns, combined with KSU’s newly announced plans for a new gateway entrance to campus off of Haymaker Parkway — and the City’s longterm desire to improve traffic safety in this corridor — led the City Engineer to create a neighborhood working group to pool ideas and find some neighborhood based solutions to minimize prospective adverse traffic impacts.

The neighborhood working group has had a number of meetings and the City Engineer recently sent around a summer update that I’ve shared below.

All,

It’s been a couple of months since we last met and I wanted to let everyone know what has been happening. In regards to hiring a consultant to assist in looking at the area, we have short listed to 3 firms and will be interviewing them next week. It has taken some time just coordinating schedules to get to this stage. Once the interviews are complete, we will negotiate a fee with the selected company and enter into an agreement. After that, they will be assisting us on continuing the planning of the project.

Kent State is still working on the selection of the team for the business building as well as the parking facility. Kelvin sent out an email about a month ago with an update. To my knowledge, nothing significant has changed since then.

I am working on summarizing the issues presented at our last meeting. The information will eventually create our Purpose and Need Statement which will guide us as we move forward through the process. Also, we are working on our Capital Budget for next year and I am recommending that we budget enough funds to get us to the stage where we are submitting for grants to help fund the improvements.

I apologize that things aren’t moving faster. Summer construction season is our busiest time and it has kept our staff running around dealing with construction issues that can’t be delayed. Speaking of construction, Summit Street has opened for good. In response, we will periodically check to see how that impacts traffic volumes along East Main Street. Lastly, I know Kent State has been busy preparing for the start of the semester yesterday which has impacted their work schedules.

Thank you again for volunteering your time and I will let you know as soon as we are ready to meet again to discuss the summary of needs as well as other things.

Sincerely,

Jim

N Water Street, Better Block Themes

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I blogged a couple weeks ago about a new effort being led by the property owners on N. Water Street (with a little help from the City and Kent State University) to re-imagine the street and to come up with creative ideas to test out as a “Better Block Project” hopefully later this year.

(To get a feel for how Better Block works you can take a look at how the Better Block Foundation helped the residents of North Hill in Arkon re-invent their neighborhood for a weekend).

In the first working session, the imagineers broke into small groups, drew ideas on maps, cut and pasted ideas, and then presented their works of inspiration to the full group.

This week, a few members of the “core team” sat down and reviewed each of the recommendations in order to identify common themes and distill the big picture ideas into a blueprint in hopes for a Better Block test run.

Here’s that list of common themes:

1. Star of the West open area could be used for outdoor activities (stage, seating, cornhole, yoga, jenga, dancing, chess, etc)
2. Mill District branding could be displayed on the Star of the West building (and other locations)
3. Crosswalks at intersection of Columbus & N. Water
4. Crosswalks at intersection of Portage & N. Water
5. Parklet in front of Scribbles Coffee
6. Pop-Up Market in the Hometown Bank parking lot next to Bent Tree Coffee
7. Vacant lot open area used for outdoor activities (across from 257 N. Water Street)
8. Low wall murals/painting in front of houses north of Bent Tree Coffee
9. General: wide use of green space (wall gardens, pocket park, etc)
10: General: wide use of bike racks

These are still just “drawing board” ideas which will have to be worked through if they’re going to make the cut for the Better Block event.

Lots of work yet to be done to figure out how to take these concepts and turn them into “proto-types” to put in the street for a weekend but it’s a great start.

The group welcomes help from anyone that finds this sort of grass roots community based planning fun.  Feel free to contact Harrison at 330 676-7500 to sign up.

Kent Heart & Soul

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Last year Council announced a community wide effort to resume the kinds of community conversations that led to Kent’s Bicentennial Plan in 2003.

This new effort eventually took on the name the OneKent initiative to emphasize the desire to have these conversations enrich the sense of unity and common purpose in the “one” Kent that we all share.

The OneKent drafting board already has a lot of great ideas posted on it — achieving the international Compassionate City designation, welcoming City designation, assisting refugees, celebrating Kent’s people.  With so many ambitious projects to choose from — where do we start?

Fortunately, Kent’s not the only community that holds big goals for the community close to it’s heart.  We found an exceptional template/road map/process that has been used and refined in many communities all across the country — it’s called Community Heart & Soul.

The more we learn about the Heart & Soul process the more convinced I am that it’s exactly what we’re looking for.

Last week we had the pleasure of meeting with a representative from the founders of the Heart & Soul process and I thought I’d share my summary of the meeting that I also shared with City Council to keep them posted of our progress:

Good Afternoon,

I wanted to let you know that this week we met with a representative from the Orton Family Foundation (Leanne) to discuss how to get started using the Heart & Soul template to engage the Kent community in the next round of community conversations and planning.  
 
The foundation representative actually flew in from Burlington Vermont to meet with officials in the City of Medina who are looking to start a Heart & Soul project in their community and since she was in the area we were able to get time with her for about 2.5 hours to talk about Kent.  By the way, she said she’ll also be back in the area in March or April and we suggested that perhaps we can set up a time to meet with each of you too.  She’s worked with literally 100’s of communities across the country so she’s got tons of practical advice and is very pragmatic about the process which we found to be extremely helpful and I think you would too.
 
The one walk away that I didn’t have before talking to Leanne was that Heart & Soul is very intentional about getting input from everyone in the community.  There’s a lot of emphasis on making sure there are no “missing voices” and she used the phrase “no voice gets left behind” as a point of emphasis to distinguish Heart & Soul from more conventional public visioning meetings.  These are not your “grandfather’s” public meetings — most of the data that is collected over the first 6-9 months is done in 2-3 person groups in a casual conversation which they refer to as allowing residents to “tell the Kent story” in their voice and from their perspective.    
 
Then, all those stories are assembled, analyzed, categorized and summarized in a way that they then become the “findings” that are presented in a larger group format for reactions and comments.  Gradually, after many meetings and discussions, the core beliefs, values and aspirational themes of the community begin to emerge, and those then become the targets for the next rounds of brainstorming, creative problem solving and planning projects to make sure those themes are honored and advanced in the community.  
 
One thing that stuck with me is that she said this is not a “sprint” — it’s a long, deliberate and slow process by design but she said that it is imperative to not short circuit that process and try to jump right in to the final stages of problem solving as tempting as that may be.  She emphasized that the slow deliberate process helps build relationships in the community as people share and tell their stories, and it’s those relationships that will pay the greatest dividends so we have to be patient enough to allow the time necessary for those relationships to evolve.  
 
There’s far too much that we learned in our meeting with Leanne to capture in an email but I wanted to give you a flavor of the conversation and let you know that we’re still working on defining the next steps we need to take.  Leanne made it very clear that one of the most important tasks for us will be finding and recruiting a core team of residents to lead this effort.  We don’t have to have a list of names yet but we should probably start thinking about who we think should or could be on that list.

Contact

Contact me: Dave Ruller: RullerD@kent-ohio.org