Panama City looking to re-vision downtown, with public input
Well, at least the plan for the plan.
The phrase of the day at the
"The key to this is going to be citizen involvement, and that is through town halls, focus groups, charrettes," said City Manager
The plan is to hire Dover,
The partnership with Dover Kohl is to be done in phases, with the first phase focused on the lower half of the downtown waterfront, McQueen said. As resources become available, the same visioning process will be done throughout the city.
This is meant to work in tandem with two other efforts.
The first is the potential 100-room hotel St. Joe is pursuing constructing on the marina. According to city leaders, St. Joe has bought into the public input process. In part because of the "respect" the company has shown to citizens, the commission unanimously moved forward with an informal and changeable memorandum of understanding.
Almost to prove it could be changed, the schedule for the planning phases was adjusted during the commission meeting at St. Joe's request to better align with public input schedule, reducing the amount of time before a conceptual design is presented to the city to five months, compared to the seven-month period outlined in the initial letter.
The second is McQueen working with
One example brought up was the repairs to the downtown marina, which the city had taken out a
There's also applications for the waterfront park in Millville, other city parks, historic preservation and much more, McQueen said.
This isn't the first time strategic plans have been done for the city, and many residents have complained the old plans ultimately sat on a shelf. But this time, leaders said it will be different, in large part because of Hurricane Michael.
However, it's worth noting a long-term plan that looks toward 2050 was part of McQueen's initial pitch when he applied for the job. Then when he started in September, he said he would deliver a look "down and in" and "up and out" within the first 120 days.
Because of the hurricane, it was a little late, but as he talked about the planning process he delivered pieces of the plan Tuesday.
The look down and in, he said, is still ongoing as he works to reconfigure the organizational chart to eliminate duplication of efforts and silos. He said the plan is 85 percent complete and he expects to finalize it at the end of the month, and bring it to the commission.
Up and out is a little more complicated. The first priority is safety and security, and after that he described "three equal lines of effort" covering infrastructure, the economy, and quality life. Changes in policy are expected to make those possible as well as significant infrastructure projects to update utilities and protect the environment.
McQueen also is looking at how to leverage Verizon's 5G investment.
All of this, with community input, will be realized in the long-term plan.
"With the storm ... we are going to be able to do things we could have thought about it doing, it would have taken 20 years to do, maybe, now we can do it in a lot less times because we have the funding to do it," Mayor
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