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:

Happy Friday Everyone:

I hope you all had a wonderful 4th of July holiday.

We reached significant milestone for GR Forward this week. Both the DDA Board and DGRI Board of Advisors received presentations on the draft plan, and voted in support of having the Planning and City Commissions release the plan for public comment. For those of you that have not seen the plan yet, here's a summary and links to the individual chapters.

In addition to releasing the plan, we were also excited to share this promotional video created raise awareness of the GR Forward effort and the recommendations coming out of the plan. A big thanks to DropDrop Studios who helped us create the video .

While this was an important week, it is certainly not the end of our work. As with any draft plan, GR Forward is not a finished product. Given the importance of this effort, we expect the draft to initiate dialogue, and we welcome any recommendations and ideas for how to strengthen it so that when it goes for final approval later in the fall, it is reflective of the entire community’s vision. I have outlined our target approval schedule below, and while the official 42-day comment period will not begin until the Planning Commission (7/23) and City Commission (8/11) hear presentations and approve the Plan’s release, if you are reviewing the document and have any questions, comments, or concerns, please direct them to me so I can determine the best way to address them.

  • July 8, 2015: Consideration of GR Forward draft by DDA; (COMPLETE)
  • July 9, 2015: Consideration of GR Forward draft by DGRI Board of Advisors; (COMPLETE)
  • July 23, 2015: Consideration of GR Forward draft by Planning Commission;
  • August 11, 2015: Consideration of GR Forward draft by City Commission for review and comment, and a recommendation to approve for distribution to impacted jurisdictions;
  • August 12, 2015: Plan distribution and notice of public hearing;
  • TBD – Consideration of GR Forward draft by MNTIFA;
  • September 22, 2015: 42-day comment period ends;
  • TBD: Following time for edits, the Downtown and River Corridor Steering Committees will meet to recommend the plan with edits incorporated from public comment to the Planning Commission;
  • October 8, 2015: Public hearing and recommendation to the Planning Commission to approve;
  • October 13, 2015: City Commission reviews final draft plan and votes to accept, modify, or reject.

Web Numbers

The latest web and social media numbers are below. Be sure to continue to share the links below in your network so everyone can stay up to date with GR Forward activities.

Resources

This article from City Lab about a concept emerging in Pittsburgh to give a busy downtown street back to people is interesting.

In an attempt to deal with highway on and off ramp traffic, and its impact on the experience of public space in Downtown Pittsburgh, the Downtown Pittsburgh Partnership organized a two-day workshop where the idea creating a shared space emerged as a favored concept. The recommendation, if advanced, would involve removing traffic signals, signs, lane markings, and crosswalks along a roughly 800-foot stretch of road in Downtown. The result of removing the normal indicators for motorists, the thinking goes, are slower speeds, which enable the different modes to co-exist. While nothing to that scale currently exists in the United States, there are examples around the world, and to a lesser degree domestically.

Though there is still work to be done to implement the full vision, it is inspiring to see innovative ideas to an issue that many downtowns have to deal with.

As always if you have questions, let me know. Otherwise, have a great weekend and we hope to see you out at Movies in the Park!