By Camas Frank ~
There are a lot of reasons that a few pop-up canopies might be in SLO’s Mission Plaza on any given weekend. Most of the time the tents are pitched for occupants selling some wares or playing a tune, but on Feb. 20, it’s was City of SLO planning officials and their hired consultants looking for a little community feedback.
The “Downtown Concept Plan” and the “Mission Plaza Master Plan” update projects are still in the early stage but they held a joint public open house in the plaza calling it “Imagine Downtown SLO.”
A second workshop to help pin down and prioritize all that brainstorming is being held from 2-5 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 27 at the SLO County Library.
With a long list of developments popping up around the Downtown core, one of the things that the consultants, Michael Baker International, were asking passers by was just how far residents think the designation “downtown” applies and what the center of activity really is?
For instance, the 75-foot high conceptual plan for the property at 1101 Monterey St. (the old Shell Gas Station) has been billed as a “Gateway to Downtown.”
Indeed members of the City’s Downtown Visioning Committee manning booths at the event noted that the logical extension of Downtown would likely be up Monterey Street.
With plenty of stickers and whiteboards to jot down ideas, the challenge will be collating all the raw data and typing up the ideas that the public offered up during the three hours staff were onsite.
To get a little more input, Pierre Rademaker, head of the Visioning Committee also took several groups on abbreviated tours of the Downtown and educated attendees as well as taking their feedback forms.
Both “visioning projects” the Mission Plaza and the Downtown, are important for the City’s overall Master Plan.
City of SLO Community Development Director, Michael Codron, said the timetable for the planning is to have all the ideas sorted and something adopted by the City Council by the end of 2016.
In addition to the complex issues of planning for private development alongside public facilities in the Downtown, the Mission Plaza itself has a number of issues that came up for discussion.
RRM Design consultant, Lief McKay, noted that expansion concepts for the plaza, such as doglegging the pedestrian corridor to include Broad or Monterey St., have been bouncing around since the last public look in 2002.
His colleague, Debbie Rudd, explained that for the actual plaza itself repair work would need to be figured into the City’s plans for any upgrades. Items staff were already aware of before the public comment, but were reinforced, include water infrastructure underneath the plaza, cracked and broken clay tiles, repair and/or upgrading of lighting fixtures, and the need to do something with the public bathrooms at the plaza.
Public feedback alternated between replacing the restrooms or getting rid of them altogether.
Ongoing project information can be found at: www.slocity.org/downtown.
An Instagram page, #imaginedowntownslo, has collected images of folks posing with suggestion flyers.
A survey will also be ongoing through the City’s website for some time.