Ideas fuel city planning

Chris Janson of MSA Professional Services and Ben Sandell of landscape architectural firm Confluence unfurled long topographic maps of downtown Burlington and the Highway 61 corridor across an array of rectangular conference tables at the public library Wednesday evening.

Armed with fistfuls of highlighters and colored sharpies, the two began crisscrossing the maps with lines and annotations as people filed into the conference room.

Tuesday and Wednesday saw Burlington's Comprehensive Plan Advisory Committee out in force, holding four several-hour-long future land-use brainstorming sessions, which left Janson and Sandell's heads swimming with ideas.

"We covered just a massive amount of things in the past couple of days," Sandell said. "Good discussion on a lot of different points. We got feedback from everybody, and almost all the different angles were represented. I thought it was very productive."

Advertisement

One workshop session was held Tuesday, with three more dominating the committee's time from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday The range of issues discussed spanned the minutiae of street-scape and signage design to the prospects of entire commercial and civic developments across the city.

"It's an elephant," said Don Traman. "You can only take a bite of it at a time. But there's different people to take different bites."

Traman serves on the flood protection committee for the Friends of the Depot. He said his personal priority for the city is to see the historic train depot revitalized. While he understands there are a variety of other areas the city must prioritize and plan for, he doesn't think he or other residents of Burlington should shutter their visions of the community's future for the sake of practicality.

"Get your vision, and let it run wild," Traman said. "You can always cut back on your vision."

Florence Paterno of Downtown Partners agreed with Traman.

See the original post:
Ideas fuel city planning