We’ve worked hard to generate interest in our downtown and it’s working so well that now we’ve got some parking issues to handle until PARTA completes their new 350 space parking garage.

It’s fantastic that Mr. Burbick put the pedal to the metal and built new stores and shops in record time — but it’s left us with a little bit of gap before all of our parking resources are in place.  But as one of our local bank Presidents said last week, “that’s a great problem to have and it’s one that we can solve.”

It is a great problem and we will solve it.  We didn’t make all this investment in downtown to leave the new shop owners high and dry with customer parking — we’ve actually got a great comprehensive parking management plan that will be in full effect in March 2013 — the trouble is between then and now we’ve got to rebuild just about all the streets that have parking on them so the shop owners that jumped in downtown early are left wondering where does that leave their customers.

Fair question, and it’s a question that we’ve been working hard to have an equally fair answer.  We’ve got some answers and we’re working with the downtown shop owners to come up with some more, but even if everything goes super smooth, the next 12 months are going to require a little creativity by customers to hang in there with us and support their new favorite shops as we rebuild everything around them.

We’ve promised to ALWAYS maintain access to the shops.  That may mean a driving over a construction plate here and there but we’ll make sure that if there’s a shop you want to get to, you can, and while parking spots may shift around as the construction shifts around, there will always be parking in reasonably close proximity to the new shops.

As you’d expect the downtown shop owners and Kent City Council have put this issue at the top of our to do list, and even though it was already there, we’re putting in more time to come up with a bunch of contingency plans to carry us through the gap period.

The Parking Action Committee (downtown business owners, citizens, and staff) met last week to share schedules, concerns and ideas for parking options.  It’s a smart and motivated bunch of people who seem to me to be exactly what we need to work our through the challenges posed by the 12 month timing gap in parking.

This group has decided to meet more frequently in order to spend more time together (and to adjust to changing construction impacts) so that we can develop and more importantly implement a strategy to minimize the construction impacts on the new business along Erie Street during this year’s street reconstruction for Depeyster and Erie Streets.

One of the more significant outcomes from the last week’s discussions was noting that even when the streets are being re-built there is free parking nearby that could be used by customers, but unless you’re a regular in downtown shopping it’s not always easy to know where that parking is.  The Kent Chamber and others are going to help with that.

Over the next week or so we plan to put together an information and marketing campaign that will include signs, brochures, ads, etc., indicating that the businesses along Erie Street are open and pointing out where to find parking in the downtown.  There’s no shortage of ideas for how to get that word out there and we’re going to commit city dollars to make sure that happens.

After hearing concerns for the many employees that work downtown who take up key retail parking spots, Public Safety Director Bill Lillich and Chief Lee also met internally to discuss options to put an increased emphasis on enforcement of the 2 hour limits in downtown, including after 5 pm and on Saturdays, in order to keep the prime retail parking locations turning over for customers rather than employees.

This past week we also met with all of the contractors downtown and advised them that they if they are using any of the on-street parking spots they will have to find alternative parking effective Monday (February 6) with the changing of the Erie Street parking from permit parking to 2 hour parking only.

PARTA, KSU and Fairmount also all agreed to put off-site parking requirements in their contracts for any of the construction work to be done downtown.

These are great places to start but the key will be sustaining this focus for 12 months and making adjustments for all those unexpected surprises that construction tends to bring.  Most of all, we need patience and persistence from new customers.  Dont’ give up on your downtown; it’s a beautiful thing even when it’s in the midst of remodeling.

We’ve waited so long for new retail and restaurants to arrive and now that there here, they need your support.  Especially in the first couple of years which are notoriously challenging for any new business.

Here were the notes I took from our weekly downtown development meeting last week (January 26):

Esplanade — The basic design of the esplanade is complete and Kent State University is working closely with the City to refine the layout to include public art opportunities and to that end, the City and KSU had a conference call with the Ohio Arts Council to explore a collaborative City/KSU planning grant to develop a master plan for public art and

Record Courier Photo of House Demo For Esplanade

Downtown Redevelopment — This relatively mild winter weather has allowed construction activity to stay busy on all aspects of the downtown projects.  The Hotel & Conference Center contractors are pouring footers for the basement which they expect to finish up next week weather permitting.  Pizzuti has placed the order for all of the structural steel and they should get their permits from the City to erect the steel in the next couple of weeks.  Pizzuti and KSU are finalizing the interior design selections for the hotel.

Forms Prepared for the Hotel & Conference Center Basement

Fairmount reports that they will soon be finishing up the steel framing of the Davey Tree building (building A) and their plumbing contractor is busy laying out the interior pipe network. For the Ametek building (building B) the structural steel is 100% erected and they are looking to pour the second and third floor slabs next week.  For building C Fairmount met with the City staff to review their plans in preparation for their scheduled Architectural Review Board meeting in February.

Alley View Between Buildings A and B

Jim Bowling has finished the engineering plans for the City’s new surface parking lot in the redevelopment block and he plans to put it out to bid next week.  The contract requires a delivery date for the new parking lot no later than August 1, which fits well Davey’s plans to move into their building by the end of August.

PARTA’s grading contractors continue to mobilize on the site and the plans for the new large retaining wall is expected to be submitted to the City staff for review and approval next week. PARTA is going out to bid for their concrete, HVAC and other trades contracts over the course of the next 2-4 weeks.

It makes sense — Kent has a number of buildings with genuine historic significance and architectural interest and the community doesn’t want to see those disappear.  Our heritage says something about who we are as a community, and as much as we want new investment and the jobs they bring, we don’t want to lose our roots and sense of place in history.

That’s why we adopted the tag line “the best of the old with the best of the new” for planning Kent’s downtown revitalization.

Progress for us wasn’t going to be defined by a bunch of shiny new buildings; it was going to be measured by how well we integrated new investment while honoring the investment that preceded it.  The last thing we wanted was a block of new buildings to look like they were air-lifted and dropped adjacent to the dowtown.

In hindsight, one of the best things we did was to invite the existing property owners in the downtown to join us around a table for 6-9 months to lay out a path for re-investment that worked in conjunction with and complemented the existing property base.  We learned from failed examples of downtown developments that literally turned their backs on Main Street and tried to do their own thing at the expense of the existing businesses.

We vowed to not let that happen and that’s in part the genesis of the Acorn Alley concept that physically connects Main Street and the older business district to all the new stuff that we’re building next to it.  That physical connection carries over into a shared parking, and a seamless use of sidewalks, street furniture, lighting and landscaping in a grid pattern that is meant to feel as it was all planned together despite the 50 year gap that separates the buildings construction.

Physical connection and complementary architecture is a prominent theme in Kent’s downtown revitalization — from the Kent State University campus esplanade extension to Acorn Alley and the renovation of Alley 3 (adjacent to Woodsy’s Music Shop) — our goal is to create synergy between the old and the new that makes them both better than ever.

Although the new construction is getting a lot of attention right now, it would be a mistake to overlook all the renovation work on older buildings that preceded it and has occurred right alongside it.  A walk down our two most prominent streets in the older business district, S. Water Street and Main Street, reveals building after building that have undergone a facelift in recent years.  Sue Nelson Designs, Franklin Square Deli, Water Street Tavern, Rays Place, the Arthur Properties, McKay Bricker Gallery (WW Reid building), City Bank Antiques, Fuller Design, the Phoenix Project…the list goes on and even around the block to include the Pufferbelly.

These are great examples of re-investment in some of the most important streetfront buildings that have come to represent Kent’s past, present and future.

To that end, the City has tried to promote property restoration and re-investment by offering grants and loans for facade improvements and architectural studies.  The City lent an employee and spent a couple of hundred thousand dollars to help Main Street Kent (and it’s historic preservation agenda) get off the ground and get a foot-hold in the downtown.   The City worked with the downtown property owners to come up with the re-development blueprint for downtown and we partnered to hire an architectural consultant to develop Kent’s first historic architectural design guidelines for properties in downtown Kent.   The City later integrated those historic guidelines into our City Code and created an Architectural Review Board to evaluate project plans in the downtown for conformance to the goals of the design guidelines.

On the heels of all these efforts to honor our historic heritage, we are planning to present a proposal to City Council this week (February 1) to become recognized by the Ohio Historic Preservation Office as a Certified Local Government.

Becoming a Certified Local Government has been on our radar screen for a 2-3 years.  It was something that we were gradually building the elements of and now we’d like to finish what we’ve started.  We believe that the CLG status is consistent with City Council’s commitment to historic preservation as it formalizes a process to preserve our historic resources, and we think now is the right time to get it put in place.

Pending the approval of the Ohio Historic Preservation Office for our CLG application, the passage of our draft Ordinance, and the designation of a historic district in our downtown we’re making a commitment to honor our heritage buildings and give the residents in our community a voice in the process for influencing the future of those historic properties (something that we did not have with the demolition of the Robin Hood last year).

We’ve already created the blueprint for historic preservation in our downtown with the passage of our downtown design guidelines and creation of the Architectural Review Board; obtaining the CLG status carries those efforts through to their natural conclusion with the official designation of an historic district and transitioning the Architectural Review Board from an advisory role to a regulatory role.

The CLG status also affords property owners within the designated historic district to be eligible to apply for historic grants and it enables them to take advantage of federal and state historic tax credits.  As we’ve seen, the greatest challenge for the preservation of our historic buildings downtown has not been the desire to restore them, but rather having the funds available to to perform the restoration.  We hope that the new potential revenues resulting from the CLG status will perhaps tip the scale economically to make the restoration efforts affordable for the property owners.

While we may want to expand the historic district in future years, we decided to start with a relatively small area where we knew property owners would most benefit from the availability of the new revenue sources.  The district can be expanded, reduced, or even eliminated, in future years by Council resolution — so there is flexibility in the historic designation which we thought was important given the regulatory nature of this new program.

There are many cities in Ohio and in our region that have obtained the CLG status from the state and they have found the historic designation an effective way to honor their architectural heritage, e.g., Hudson, Aurora, Alliance, Barberton, Berea, Green, Loraine, Medina.  We have talked with a number of these cities, we’ve talked with the staff at the Ohio Historic Preservation Office, and we’ve talked with some of the property owners in Kent as part of our due diligence before recommending taking this final action.

When we make regulatory changes like this, we typically work intentionally slow and methodical in order to solicit a lot of community feedback as we work to devleop the best proposal possible for City Council consideration.  Ideally, we would have preferred a 2-3 month process to work through all the small details of the Ordinance but it was brought to our attention that the next cycle of historic grants and tax credits is upon us and property owners have until March 31 to get their applications in for the state or they would have to wait potentially until 2013 before investing in any renovation work — and that includes the old hotel.

After waiting 20+ years to get that old hotel under renovation we felt it was critical to not hold up the old hotel renovation by another year, so rather than trying to get our CLG program perfect from the start, we’ve taken a different approach to create the basic outline of the CLG, build some flexibility into the program so it can be refined through the lessons of experience with it, and get it approved now so that the property owners within the district could seek the funds this year.

The Ohio Historic Preservation Office (OHPO) has already given us some feedback on our proposed CLG application and their feedback was positive.  There are multiple state reviews that have to occur so there are no guarantees for approaval at this point, but the OHPO staff have indicated we’re off to a good start and they offered to do whatever they can to help us get through the state review process as quickly as possible in order to support the proposed old hotel renovation, as well as other projects that may arise in the district.

From the start of our downtown revitalization efforts, we stated publicly that our success depended upon our ability to integrate the best of the old with the best of the new — I’m proud with what we’ve achieved in integrating new investment and new buildings into our downtown, now we think it’s time to finish what we started and formalize the preservation of Kent’s historic resources in the downtown through the Certified Local Government and historic district designation.

The department is scheduled to begin its second Citizen Police Academy on Thursday February 2nd.  The class is open to local residents at least 18 yeas of age with no criminal history.  Any interested applicants can access the Kent Police  website or contact Lt. Canfield for more information at 330.673.3221.

The Citizens Police Academy will involve eleven weekly classes. The first class will be held on Thursday February 2, 2012. Subsequent classes will be held each Thursday, and the graduation will be on April 19, 2012.

Each four hour class will be held at the Kent Police Department. Attendees will learn about criminal law, case law, court processes, parking and traffic enforcement, drunk and drugged driving enforcement, criminal investigations, use of force, crime prevention, and specialized police functions.

Attendees will also be afforded to experience officer “Ride-alongs” and police equipment. This is a rare opportunity for area residents to see the difference between television and the reality of police work.

The trendy new coffee shop doesn’t disappoint, combining funky decor (love the arty fire place), including fully equipped wi fi seating, with great options of organic,  free trade ground beans for a long list of your favorite flavored coffee.

In a unique twist, Tree City has built in a drive thru along the west edge of the building that gives commuters a chance to not miss their morning cup of Joe.

Please help support this new locally owned shop.

Here’s a little more information off their Facebook site.

PROGRAM APPLICATION PROCESS

The meetings are open to the public so if you have an interest in learning more about rescue team work, please feel free to attend.

Here’s the meeting notice sent out by Bill Lillich, Public Safety Director:

January 4, 2011

Dear Safety Director’s Community Advisory Committee Members,

This is a reminder that our next meeting is scheduled for next Tuesday, January 10, 2012.  The subject of this meeting is Special Rescue Teams in Portage County, of which our fire department is a substantial participant.  The presentation will take you through the selection, equipment and training process for three major Portage  County response teams with which the department participates.  These teams are the Urban Search & Rescue Team, the Confined Space Rescue Team and the Portage County Dive Team.

We hope to see you all there.

Respectfully,

Bill Lillich
Our next meeting is scheduled for March 13, 2012.

So make a Friday lunch date and support Kent’s newest family owned and operated business located in at the corner of Erie Street and Depeyster Street in the heart of downtown Kent.

I realize it’s a bit confusing with all the construction going on downtown but just head to the new corner building in Mr. Burbick’s Acorn Alley project and you can’t miss it.

Parking is available up and down Erie Street and around the block.

Laziza’s is a mediterranean  based cuisine that offers a tasty range of alternatives for palattes that are looking for a little more ethnic flavors.

It’s exciting to see another new place open up.  Help us support it.