How will the Downtown Plan affect Economic Development? And did they violate open meetings laws?
Well, they’re not sure.
Julia Stone reported to the Economic Development Committee that her and 4 or 5 people got together to review the Downtown Plan. I didn’t hear who the others were, but I think she said Joe Boucher, Ed Clarke, and Matt, but it wasn’t clear if it was staff (Mikolajewski) or committee member (Younkel).
Stone said they talked about the origins of the plan, how it fits in the bigger picture and that they need some focus on how to evaluate it evaluate it in regards to economic development.
Doug Nelson asks what the timeline is and what the focus of review will be.
Stone said they were trying to figure it out.
Ed Clarke that the Downtown Plan was supposed to be done in September.
Tim Cooley, Economic Development Director says that is the target date, and the Economic Development Commission should take a look at it and see where it fits as far as economic development and identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and have a report and discussion in a Economic Development Commission meeting and then give their recommendations to the council.
Vicky Selkowe asks how to get to the bottom of how to review the plan.
Stone says they are trying to see kind of what work other communities have done, looking for input from the committee. They are looking for direction, it’s kind of nebulous about what we are supposed to do, its a large plan, much of it doesn’t pertain to economic development.
Clarke says its an interesting discussio, suggests they go back to our plan and do an overlay of that plan with downtown plan, what are economic development goals, where are opportunities for job creation or entrepreneurship and then try to see if there is much of anything in the plan that has an economic development focus. Much of the plan is about building heights, but there are some interesting and controversial issues like parking that have an economic development focus in some people’s eyes, not for some others.
Cooley says they need to look at financial feasibility and time horizons, there are some beautiful pictures and ideas, but how will it be paid for and how will it be integrated, committee should look at fiscal sustainability of downtown, look at barriers and how to get flexibility to work with investors and developers to have a sustainable downtown area. (Note: Flexibility, not predictability that they are looking for here.)
Selkowe says this is a big task and the more people talks the bigger it gets.
Cooley says this is a report by designers and architects, beautiful renderings, but how do they work?
Clarke says the plan is for a vision and they should work towards it, he says can’t have to have (??) they need to have big dreams.
Selkowe asks when they will have something to discuss.
Someone said in September.
Cooley says no, that is when report back to plan commission, once we have it, then the sub group can look at it. Thinks it will be referred to Economic Development Commission and that is when they should get involved.
I missed some of the discussion.
COMMENT: I know that this doesn’t seem like a particularly interesting conversation and you’re probably wondering why I’m blogging it. Well, my question is, how could a sub group of the Economic Development Committee meet and report back and not notice it as a public meeting? I think they think they are ok, because they don’t have negative quorum, but if the EDC created the group and they reported back to EDC and are doing work on behalf of the EDC, I think they need to formally notice their meetings. They can’t avoid open meetings laws by calling it a “work group” and making sure that they don’t have negative quorum and then saying they don’t need to publicly notice their meetings.
