Last night’s group welcomed several new faces from city council members to court personnel. A draft document written by John Russell (FEMA – urban planning background) was reviewed to get the committee focused on the steps that it will take to get to the ultimate goal of creating this new downtown business development area that will be presented to the City Council as a recommendation from this citizen-driven committee.
While the draft was somewhat detailed — and it was recognized that detail would be necessary going forward — the conversation leaned more towards the immediacy of protecting the area of concern while not only this committee, but the city leaders, had time to digest exactly what was necessary for this portion of the rebuild in terms of regulations, building codes, building specifications, street improvements, etc.
The committee approved the appointment of a sub-committee composed of Jill Celaya, John Russell, Teresa Rochetti-Cantrell, and Tim Choate, to meet with city attorney Bo Neely as soon as possible to present our recommendation for a six-month “assessment period” to keep construction in that area from occurring until everything could be properly researched and amended, as needed. The moratorium, or assessment period would involve all properties between James Street and North Street on the north and south, and both sides of 7th Street and 8th Street on the east and west boundaries.
As the committee looks to the ramifications of such an assessment period (moratorium), we heard from Ryan Drane, who is on Design/Rebuild committee as a liaison between our group and the Long Term Recovery Group that is dealing with a lot of the home building groups that are in town to build homes for tornado victims. That group could be instrumental in finding alternate locations for any residential builds that would be affected by the moratorium, in exchange for their property located in the proposed business district.
The group scheduled the next meeting for Monday, June 6, 2022, at 4pm at the Annie Gardner Foundation (Note change of time)
