A similar, if not the same, team of urban planners, architects, marketing analysts and other experts that visited Columbus in 2009 and West Point in 2010 will turn its focus to Starkville over the course of this week. And they all want to meet you.
The charrette crew, a Mississippi Main Street Association resource team, wants as many citizens as possible to pack the Greensboro Center tonight from 6-7:30 p.m. to tell them what”s good about Starkville, what”s bad about Starkville and where Starkville needs to be years from now.
Obviously, that”s a lot of information to digest. But the charrette team makes its living focusing the hopes and concerns of many into a few action items; several suggestions to help municipalities fulfill their potential.
First up on Mayor Parker Wiseman”s list of issues to address with the charrette team are the Highway 182 corridor and the lingering debate over the city”s need for a new municipal complex.
“Everything we do will have a city focus and will be something government leaders are interested in, but those two projects are high on the priority list,” said Wiseman.
Highway 182, he said, has suffered in recent years due to the emergence of Highway 12 as a commercial corridor and the completion of the Highway 82 bypass, which routes traffic around Highway 182. However, Wiseman believes Highway 182 remains a crucial piece of Starkville”s strategic future.
“It”s in close proximity to Main Street, which has seen a major commercial resurgence in the last decade, and serves as a gateway to one major entrance to Mississippi State University, which gives it significance not only to this community but the whole state,” he said. “It also services about one quarter of the school children in the Starkville School District, so it”s of strategic importance to our education system.”
With regard to the municipal complex issue, Wiseman said the citizens committee which has been appointed to research the topic will bounce its ideas off the charrette team to see if the out-of-towners can lend a fresh perspective to the stymieing problem.
“The committee has some real ideas they”ve formulated and they”re going to sit down and talk to the charrette team for a while about what they”ve learned through their process so the charrette team can incorporate that into its overall vision for downtown Starkville. Because any development of the municipal complex will be of central importance to downtown,” he said.
Several aldermen voiced their agreement with addressing Highway 182 and the municipal complex Monday, but added their own concerns.
Ward 2 Alderman Sandra Sistrunk hopes to see a unified theme emerge which can spread beyond downtown to all wards. Starkville could see a theme established through branding and signage, much like Columbus, which adopted a series of logos developed by the charrette team which are featured prominently on banners and signs in the downtown area.
“I hope the focus on development can bleed over into wards like mine outside the downtown corridor. Maybe we can incorporate some of the appearances and what we want Starkville to look like and pull that into my ward,” she said.
Ward 5 Alderman Jeremiah Dumas, a landscape architect, is familiar with many of the processes used by the charrette team. He knows they”re well capable of coming up with sexy ideas, but he”s anxious to hear their suggestion for making those ideas become reality.
“Above and beyond the pretty pictures, I hope they an help us garner some idea of implementation strategies for actually making this stuff come to fruition. We have to have the frameworks in place to make it work. That to me is the big question, when the rubber meets the road on the policy side,” he said.
And the charrette team will do both. They”ll present pretty pictures, often computerized mock-ups which use current photography overlain with graphics depicting suggested enhancements. And they”ll suggest where to find funding for those suggestions Friday in the team”s final meeting with Starkville officials.
The first round of drawings, designed using information gathered from citizens tonight, will be presented to the public tomorrow at 6 p.m. at the Carl Small Town Center in Giles Hall on the MSU campus.
The team will tweak those designs based on feedback from tomorrow”s crowd and make a final public presentation Thursday from 6-7:30 p.m. at the Greensboro Center.
Jason Browne was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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