Citiwire.net

For Release Sunday, September 5, 2010
Citiwire.net

The people have spoken in Owensboro — an Ohio River city of just over 50,000 souls in mostly rural western Kentucky. They want to hitch their town’s star to a dazzling waterfront and downtown agenda.

The turning point was a “21st Century Town Meeting” in 2007, organized with help from the national nonprofit organizing group “We the People” and supported by the Public Life Foundation, funded and chaired by veteran Owensboro publisher and philanthropist John Hager.

Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson, who’d authored one of their Citistates reports on regional challenges for the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer in 1991, returned for the kickoff town meeting. Back then they’d written that “Owensboro must pledge itself to an intensive campaign to recreate downtown with character and attractiveness, a true meeting place for the region’s people and visitors from afar.” They urged the waterfront to be reinvented as the “living room” of Owensboro.

That is exactly what Owensboro is doing today. Since the 2007 meeting — and notwithstanding the recession — Owensboro has almost $120 million underway in public and private developments for its downtown and river front.

Let me confess: I’m no “objective” outsider on Owensboro’s big step forward. My firm, the Gateway Planning Group, was hired by the Owensboro Economic Development Corporation to facilitate a placemaking initiative. We’ve been in the thick of the effort to give Owensboro a strong fresh start.

There was, in fact, lots to work with. If you are a bluegrass fan, or if you’re a big-name performer not-too-distant Nashville, you remember Owensboro’s now defunct Executive Inn Showroom, a famous place for music and show on the river. The slow death of the Executive Inn ushered in a new era of culture in Owensboro with a nationally recognized symphony, an “off-Broadway” River Park Performing Arts Center, and a new reputation for festivals including the nationally recognized Mystery Writers’ Festival.

But there was a problem. People would visit downtown for an event — and then leave. A better place making formula had to be found for a full-fledged, day-and-night center of attraction.

My associates and I think we helped find it. But only because of key local leaders had been waiting patiently, itching for a breakthrough. Two top examples: Terry Woodward of Waxworks and Benny Clark of Benny Clark Homes. Woodward had kept his international media business downtown and positioned an adjacent parcel for a mixed use complex in the heart of an emerging arts enclave on downtown’s east side. Aiming to be a key downtown developer, Clark and his partner Paula had purchased land on the blighted west side and transformed it into Sycamore Square, a now-successful high-end town home neighborhood. A few others, such as restaurateur Malcom Bryant, had continued to invest time, money and reputation in downtown.

These trail blazers understood that their future would lighten from the promise to profit by building on downtown’s history and authenticity. But they needed the certainty and predictability that only a public sector partner could deliver.

Concurrently, Nick Brake and Madison Silvert of the Owensboro Economic Development Corporation were also tired of waiting, hungering for a process leading to real action.

My colleagues and I, taking advantage of a dozen prior plans and a new waterfront park under design, aimed to generate investment in downtown as a true neighborhood. Joined by the firms Kimley Horn, CityVisions and TXP, we enabled Owensboro to take advantage of its history of arts and culture, not just for tourism but as a driver to attract people who can live and work anywhere they choose.

Engaging the business and banking community early on was critical; we believed a complete reinvention of the traditional business model for downtown was necessary. In many downtowns, the inability to predict the future use of adjacent parcels stunts investment potential. After analyzing the blocks and streets of downtown, we developed a community-driven and we believe realistic building-scale master plan. The plan set a a strong neighborhood vision for downtown but also identified elements of the broken street network that needed to be healed from years of suburbanization. Following the master plan, the firm Entrans is completing the comprehensive reinvention of a walkable street network.

The master plan then guided the development of a form-based code for the rezoning of downtown — reversing, in effect, guidelines of the prior code that had fostered decades of development more suburban than truly urban. For example, incorrectly located surface parking lots and disconnected private lot frontages had resulted in large voids.

The new code resulted in 20-plus applications soon after its adoption. It sets design and development standards that link Owensboro’s historic courthouse square, redeveloped loft buildings along its historic Second Street, its waterfront, its successful but isolated performing arts center, and its disconnected adjacent in-town neighborhoods through a new convention center, a new convention center hotel, an emerging cultural arts district, and mixed use residential buildings along the waterfront.

Mayor Ron Payne and County Judge Reid Haire were encouraged to convene the City and County Commissions — in official joint session for the first time ever — to commit to investment in key catalytic projects. That, in turn, meant the private sector no longer had an excuse to ignore downtown’s prime investment opportunity.

Downtown investors or property owners now know they can count on quality public and private development down the street or a block over. That gives bankers strong rationale to underwrite loans. In an era of tightening credit, this de facto “master developer” context has elevated downtown as a much lower risk. One indicator: the local banking community has now created a joint loan pool for downtown redevelopment.

Marveling today at cranes in the sky, the director of downtown development, Owensboro native Fred Reeves, observed recently that the “attention to the not-so-sexy aspects of the downtown plan — such as infrastructure, regulation and financing options — has built a strong framework to catch the public’s attention and gain its support.”

Owensboro ia proof that every community, analyzing realistically and setting realistic new development rules, has the capacity to move aggressively into a new economy of place.

Scott Polikov is president of the Gateway Planning Group and serves on the national board of directors of the Congress for the New Urbanism. He can be reached at 512.451.4098 or scott@gatewayplanning.com.

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