Downtown Grand Rapids Inc. Planning Manager Tim Kelly emails a weekly GR Forward update to the project Steering Committee. Here's this week's communication:

Good Morning All:

Hope you are finishing another great week.

Updates

Just a quick reminder that our Open House is maintaining regular hours from 3p – 7p every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. If you have not had a chance to stop down, we would love to see you. Also, if you have any upcoming meetings that you would like to use the space for, please let me know. This week we were happy to host the groups listed below. I want to give a special thank you to the team from the Chamber of Commerce, including Rick Baker, Ciciley Moore, and Paula Englin for putting on a fantastic event last night. They were able to bring in close to 100 visitors to the Open House, and we received a lot of great input from those in attendance.

• Stepping Stones Montessori School (see attached photo)

• Chamber of Commerce Moving GR Forward Event

• Friends of Grand Rapids Parks

Last night we also held our first neighborhood meeting with our neighbors in Black Hills. We had some really good conversations with neighbors about their thoughts on Downtown and the Grand River, and we look forward to continuing that conversation with them, and the other neighborhoods, over the next few months.

Next week will be another very busy week for all of us working on the project. We have three additional neighborhood meetings set (see attached schedule), and our first GR Forward Thinking Speaker Series event will also be happening on Thursday, November 20 at 6:30p (see attached flyer). Along with this, we are looking forward to having our consultants in town and reconvening all of the Steering Committees for a discussion on the work that has been done to date, as well as the schedule for the remainder of the project.

Presentations

Another good week of getting out to give presentations in the community. Again, if anyone has suggestions for meetings that we can attend please let me know.

• Downtown Development Authority

• Parking Commission

• Heartside Business Association

• Monroe North Business Association

Web Numbers

As with the previous weeks, the website and our Facebook account continue to get heavy traffic. Instagram and Twitter are lagging a bit, but we hope to drive more traffic to those mediums with our upcoming events. As always, be sure to share the links below with anyone that might be interested so we can continue to promote GR Forward.

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/grfwd

Twitter - https://twitter.com/grfwd

Instagram - http://instagram.com/grfwd#

Resources

Some great inspirational riverbank projects in this article: http://landarchs.com/10-awesome-riverbank-projects/. I particularly enjoyed the two examples from France, and would love to see some of the features they installed incorporated into the future plan for the Grand River.

As always, if you have any questions let me know. Otherwise, have a great weekend.