Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

Well, good afternoon. Ah, you can hear me today. People outside are turning around. Well, this has been a great week. Uh, and from this is my first shared involving a comprehensive plan and I have not been able to attend them all, but I have followed them and you know what I'm understanding is participation has been good. you know, we've gotten people that are engaged and interested that and that's where we need to be hearing from and providing this opportunity is exciting. I know for me it's exciting, but I think also for the city and and to allow those that have that interest in having their voice heard and uh certainly there's many of y'all and I know many of y'all are very involved in uh wanting to see uh a complete comprehensive plan for the city. and and I I for one am right there with us and I appreciate Demi and her leadership in terms of uh pulling this together uh pushing the council towards this because oftentimes we get involved in things we don't fully understand what we're doing. So I hope this isn't being recorded. Let's delete that part. And uh but anyway, thank y'all all for being here and I'm going to turn it over to Demi at this point.

Thank you. Thank you, Mayor West. Um, real quick, I just want to give a thank you to everyone that has, uh, dedicated the time and put in effort to this plan. This is just the beginning. Um, it's just the community goals before we go and draft the plan. So, there'll be another round of engagement after this. Um, but again, just want to say thank you guys so much and I'm excited to hear what we've learned over the week and what our community wants. Thank you guys.

Thank you, Demi. Uh, let's see. Good. Okay. Okay. Hello everyone. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Uh my name is Samuel Hos. I am joined here today by Victoria Chavez, by Alfonso Kamacho, by Frank Ratnowski and by Niko Molina. Um we are all from Able City. Um we're very we had a great week and we are excited to kind of recap with you um in this work in progress presentation. Little agenda for today. Um we're going to do the team introduction which we just did. uh comprehensive plan introduction. Then we're going to do the timeline process. We're going to recap and we're going to do show you our five big ideas that you all told us. Um and then we'll have some final thoughts. So like I said, we are from Abel City from San Antonio. Um we really um put our hat on our integrated approach uh where we get to flex all our muscles um where we do a little planning, a little architecture, a little economic development and most importantly uh community engagement which is what this week was all about. Comprehensive plans uh we've done a few before. Um but it's always exciting to come into a community and and really get into the nitty-gritty with everybody. Um so again, here's [clears throat] everybody that was here this week. We had a couple in office that were supporting us that weren't here. But as you can see, a bunch of familiar faces up on the screen there. Our team also consisted of uh KDson and Associates from uh they were our transportation engineers from Houston and also Pa and Co. Um and they were doing a lot of the infrastructure work. Our timeline uh Sheret uh this is our final event in the Sharet uh February 2026. Um, so after this we'll go back, we'll do some uh drafting and we're going to present what we what we come up with in our draft to the community and then we will um have you have everyone in Bumont comment on it and provide us

some feedback. Hopefully by the end of summer we will have a uh final uh uh adoption and plan. So what is a comprehensive plan? Comprehensive plan, we've been talking about it all week. It's a it's a community vision. It's a guide for growth. It helps um communities compete for things like funding, but it's also a a tool for help to build quality of life here. It's goals and policies at its core. What are goals and policies? It's it's you know, it's a goal is is an overarching vision. It's update the city's zoning code. And then the policy helps reflect it, refineses that further and it goes into each one of those. What it is not, it is not codes and ordinances. codes and ordinances come later. The rules follow the guidelines and the goals and the policies that we adopt in the comprehensive plan. So the comprehensive plan is really the foundation of everything. Whereas and and this is where all the the things the code and the updates come later on. This is where we find the vision. This is where we find the direction is during this process. This comprehensive plan is made up of all these elements uh that you see up here. Um each one of these will basically be the the indicators, the chapters of this vision. You'll see land use, you'll see economic development, you'll see facilities of public services, transportation, housing, parks, trails, cultural and historic preservation, and this uh comprehensive plan is is unique because there's a big resiliency component to this. So, I always like to put up this uh this quote here, you know, what is citymaking? And really what it boils down to it's it's the organized pursuit of a better quality of life. quality of life is is was a big topic uh this week and and so you know it really it really I love this quote here really fits um and who's responsible uh everyone right everyone is responsible for this the decision makers the residents um we are

all responsible the stakeholders um and and and that's what makes it so fun so um I am going to uh kick it over to Victoria and she's going to recap the week for All righty guys. So as you can see a big part of a comprehensive plan is the community engagement. And so with that we came here for the community cheret. We started on Monday. Most of you guys were actually here and we asked participants look at these maps that have various focus areas here in Bulma and give us your big ideas. What is something that needs to be here? or what are challenges or certain strengths that we can look into it. This is actually the foundation for the rest of the week that we can build upon. You guys also presented to the uh to the group telling us explaining what your ideas are, not just so we can read it, but we can hear you and explain it a little deeper. We also hosted open studios. It's like an open house where people came in, saw what we're doing, what we're working on. We provided various different activities that connected to different elements that build a comprehensive plan. We were mostly located on Maine and downtown library, but we also traveled this open studio to meet people where they are. We started in RC Miller Memorial Library. We also went to Theodore Jo's Library and Elmo Wilder Library as well. Not only that, we connected with industries like at Lamar University where we got to talk about resiliency, host a lecture, have people could discuss and dig a little bit deeper on how our connections can build with real resilency and the university. We also hosted various focus group meetings with that. That means we meet

with key stakeholders like housing, parks, recreation, environmental development and tourism, transportation, um, cultural and historic. We had two meetings every day that lasted about an hour and a half or almost two hours for some. We had great discussions. We got to ask questions and really understand at a deeper level on these elements that build the comprehensive plan. Overall we had about over a 100 participants. This isn't even accounting for survey response that we have seen which have come out to around 263 as of right now. We also hosted around eight meetings including this one here. So what was the whole point? What did we hear? Well, we gathered all that information from the different activities we had like the visual preference survey. As you can see, we calculated the voting there for housing types, housing designs, commercial, street design, parks and open space, signs, and even when people wrote their one bold idea for Bulmont's future. We heard stuff like stronger partnership with Lamar and Alli, homeless issue resolved in public safety, community vision. We also had a funding game where people got to hold chips and vote and pretty much create a budget of what their priorities of public services are. Also, on Monday for the community presentation, we asked you all, what's one word that comes to mind when you think about Bulmont? As you can see, there's a big emphasis on resilience, family, potential, culture. This again was repeated throughout the whole week as we talk to various people, stakeholders, the public, and we want to

make sure that this plan represents what's here. So, with that, I'm going to pass it back to Frank.

Hi. Thank you all for being here today. Uh just like Victoria said, uh we spent a lot of time here, nights and days, and we interacted with so many of you. Uh and uh what we wanted to uh talk about is what we learned. And we do have a slide that says five big ideas, but obviously there were so many more. But what we tried to do was synthesize um things that we heard at the first night on Monday when we were all here working hands on these hands-on events to the meetings that uh was just presented to you. And so we we tried to bring them together best we could and uh we we came up with these. Number one, we've heard a lot to protect and restore your downtown. To create mobility options that are safe, connected, and are beautiful to be in, to increase access to your parks and nature, and to plan a prosperous city for everyone, and lastly, leverage heritage and institutions as an engine for innovation. So we would like to start with big idea number one to protect and restore the downtown. And I think just every focus group meeting that I attended or talked to people this came up your downtown right here because you have an amazing downtown. In fact, one person said, "We've have to be able to protect that character." And how do we do that? So what we always like to do is take a deeper dive into the history of the communities that we work in. And really you have a fabulous history. It begins with the river and we go back to indigenous tribes that roam this area to the both French and Spanish explorations uh that occurred here as well to the

coming of your railroad which changed everything your logging industry and your trade and then as I learned the phrase then there was the boom uh that changed Bulmont, Texas and really the world uh and the way that uh that continued to uh allow this community to prosper into oil and gas into ship building uh into the development of this beautiful downtown that we uh are here to talk about today. You also, we learned, have a really a budding and thriving arts community here. You have a lot of people dedicated to the arts, performing, visual. You have an amazing amount of uh cultural institutions here for a city of of your size and a newly formed cultural uh cultural district which is also really important uh for a community uh to be able to uh to to grow uh that. And these are all important uh aspects of quality of life for a city that um people want to come to live in. and you want to be able to retain uh your younger uh generations. You're a relatively young uh population here, but you are losing younger people. We've talked to some that said they've lost their friends. They go to school, they'll go to Lamar, and then they move on. And the quality of life is such an important part of it. And your downtown is the uh anchor of that. I'm having a loading issue. Interesting. Okay. I don't know if there's a slide out. Sorry. We have a technical uh There it is.

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Okay. Well, so um the the the really uh wonderful thing is that you do have you are you have set the table. you've done all the right things in terms of you have two important historic districts in place as you know you don't have to have me tell you what you have but you have the Oaks uh Oldtown District which is uh the largest historic district uh uh residential district in uh in Texas uh and you also have a national uh registered uh uh commercial district which by the way is really amazing because you're one of the first his national historic districts in the country. The whole program was formed in the late60s with the preservation act and you all uh started this process in 1978. Uh you you you further adopted uh and amended it in 2008. Actually I was here for that. I was on the the Texas Historic Commission state review board when we approved that. And um and so you have you h there's what we like to say you have that you have Bowmont. You have it there. you have what other cities wish they had in terms of the the uh quality of your historic fabric. In fact, you have 54 contributing historic structures in your commercial district. That's amazing for the size of of your town. And so, this is your greatest asset. And we also know that uh it's seen better days. Uh there are uh um some opportunities that have come up. there are people uh working on this uh but it's a tall task. Sometimes it could be seem overwhelming uh what to do but we do have a lot of uh places to go and learn to see how other cities and towns have done it. Uh Texas and throughout this country uh uh communities turn

their downtowns around and uh we feel like by working together we can come up with a really good plan to do that. And we talk about preservation not for the sake of preservation although it's important. It's your heritage. It's your story is that what's makes it's what makes Bulmont Bulmont. It's also then how do we restore it yet bring it back into a contemporary uh community new needs. And that's what we refer to as adaptive reuse uh or repurposing. And it's also important to talk about when we talk about sustainable design. I mean basically restoration, the recycling of a building is the ultimate design uh is the ultimate sustainable design practice because you're working with something that exists with amazing stories. And the stories in these buildings are uniquely Bulmont nowhere else. So these are the things that are important to be able to identify what best works, what are your needs. Of course, we heard a lot about that this week. And I think one of the areas that rose to the top was bring people downtown by bringing them back to live here because with that comes other quality of life um um uh uh enterprises come and develop your downtown. And to do that, you have some great things going for you. uh and you uh together we can come up with a great plan for that. Um just as a an example of somebody comparable in terms of your size, if we just travel a little further to the west, this this is San Angelo, Texas. St. Angelo has a population of 100,000 people. It was founded on a river with its own unique history and its own unique stories. And they got together when their downtown

obviously hit a downturn in the 70s and 80s and they wound up with 115 vacant historic structures in their downtown and that was 15 years ago. Today they've restored and put back into use 85 of those properties and they did it by overlaying their resources and most importantly their community. What did they do? They took buildings like at the upper left, an abandoned hotel, the Roosevelt, and the lower left restored it into loft living. They brought their college downtown. They cultivated their arts districts, and they got property owners and business owners to dedicate themselves to restoring building by building uh these these these properties. And if you go to St. Angelo today. It's it's really quite amazing the turnaround in 15 years. Uh they did it with a dedicated city working with a newly founded Main Street program, business property owners, property owners, and then they did something interesting. Uh they um they formed a uh a cultural arts overlay district which really helped lead the way for all kinds of things in terms of guidelines uh but also funding mechanisms and funding opportunities. I'm hitting another loading. Sorry. Exit out. They're not loading.

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Okay. Well, um these were a couple of examples, big bites and small bites in in communities. Some some that we worked on. Uh this is one of an abandoned 100 room hotel. There you go. This is an This was a a vacated and abandoned 100 room hotel uh that came back into the downtown by reinventing it into housing and it became one, two, and three uh uh studio, one and two-bedroom apartments, I think 68 with uh restaurants on the lower level retail and became a very successful uh project. And by the way, this wasn't just a developer putting money into it. It was a it was a culmination of things. It was historic tax credits. There's different uh funding mechanisms that you can overlay uh to get these properties back into action. Uh another one was a abandoned car dealership. In the upper left you can see not only abandoned but pretty much left left for dead. uh and that became uh a young person's entrepreneur incubator which received funding from the uh the EDA the economic development uh out of Washington and now it's put back and repurposed and is a very lively place where young people come and go and enjoy being in downtown. And the last one that we worked on that we would like to talk about is this upper leftand corner. This was a very uh old 1928 residence of a prominent family happens to be in Laredo border town uh that over the years left it vacated. It became abandoned and you can see the lower left ultimately was uh completely uh taken falling apart. It was red tagged by the city to be demolished. We were able to put a group together. We got grants uh to be able to uh put it

back together both externally as and restore it. in its original grandeur and internally became a cultural arts uh border heritage museum for the city with indooroutdoor spaces used year round and very very successful. So these are the kinds of things that you can do. I'm going to pass it over to uh back to Sam. Thanks Frank. [clears throat] So here's another quote just building on what Frank's talked about um from one of the sharet participants. The downtown needs interesting shopping streets which blend the indoors and outdoors with a variety of spaces for a variety of tenants. Now, we've talked a lot this week about this model that our team built for downtown. Um, and and this model is really a best case scenario, it's a maximalist view of what a 25-year vision could look like. It's activated river spaces, it's new buildings, it's it's all kinds of of things. And and in this model, we we look at the nuts and bolts of it, you know, about building, you know, hundreds of more buildings. Um about increasing, you know, tenfold the food and drink offerings and and the stores and offices. Um it's about increasing, you know, residential um residences, if you will, uh downtown. So, and really what this does is it shows that if you bring, you know, 6,000 people downtown in 25 years, you can increase, you know, your your revenue down here. Um, and that that in turn helps fund city services. It helps fix your potholes. It helps, you know, fix your water manes. You know, if you're downtown is performing like it should, it it it really does help everyone in the city. But, you know, it's we're optimists as planners. We have to be. We are forward-looking. Um, but we always, you know, it's important to remember that to to be grounded a little bit. And and we we've heard some some other some push back this week, and that's fine. That's what we're here for. You know, one of

the things we It's hard to find someone with 15 million in their pocket just ready to to catalyze one of these projects. Some people even say that some buildings may not be financially feasible to restore. And and maybe that's true. But a couple blocks away from where the open studio um was is this building. Um and you know, it's it's seen better days. Um, it's even got a uh the roof collapsed and you know uh maybe this building isn't worth putting a new roof on and and putting fancy fixtures and and new windows and things like that, but there's creative ways that you can use spaces in in the city and and you know, you don't always have to bring things back 100%. You can create markets, you can you can create public spaces and and these things can be unique and they can be creative. These are the kind of things that people go and they take pictures of on their own because they've never seen anything like it. It's free marketing for Bowmont, right? You know, these sort of things. You you take this this structure on the outside, you repurpose it. You don't have to put a ton of money into it. You can just make it somewhat um you could put some investment into it and and create these spaces. And you know, this this isn't this isn't a new idea. Um this happens all over the country. This is a a space in Albany, New York. Um, this was this is Albany Distilling Company. Uh, it was on a dead dead corner of a of a block. The owner bought this building. It was completely could not figure out how to renovate it. Um, so he didn't. He secured the walls. He brought it up to compliance and he turned it into a courtyard. And, uh, you know, these are the kind of things that, you know, you know, you can you can adapt. You can preserve the urban uh, environment in creative ways. It doesn't always have to be a $15 million project. Just another example, uh Birmingham, Alabama, uh this creative space there that took an old warehouse, made it a

made it a creative, uh gathering space for people and and left it all exposed and left it all out there for the elements, but but it was still a place that people gathered. We also heard that uh you know Bulma used to have a a public square and and I think that's important that people need a a gathering space uh something that everyone understands and goes to and and knows like this is where things happen. This is where people go where every event is held. In in our model we we we thought maybe somewhere in the south end of of downtown could uh could be that. But there are other options too, right? There's there's the north end as well. And and I think, you know, it's important that, you know, no matter what, it's you you like Frank mentioned, you know, you you really have to lean into that to to the river and to being close to that water. Um other creative ways we we on Monday we talked about this idea of faith-based housing initiative. Uh if finances are tough, there's there's creative solutions. Um and and and faith-based housing is is one of those solutions. you have properties uh that are owned by faith-based institutions that are debtree, taxfree um and you know and maybe um housing is part of their mission of helping and being supportive. Um this right here top image is of South Bend, Indiana. Um and you and the the image below is a is a rendering of what these parking lots look like. And and you know some of these spaces even look kind of like Bowmont and and it's not unique to Bowmont. There's places all over the country that look like this. Um, and and what we we we looked at St. Anony's Basilica, which has, you know, almost six city blocks worth of land. We actually during this process, we met this gentle gentleman who who worked there and told us a little bit about the story that it was all oblided neighborhoods around there and they tore it down because it it just didn't look good. They have no plan. So, we thought, well, what what could we do with this

property? And we looked at there was an existing parking lot uh just across the street. We thought, hey, what if we what if we add some spaces and and put some housing in. And you know, and this kind of design is is designing with intention. And you want to enhance the assets that Bowmont has, these beautiful buildings that Bowmont has, and you can create beautiful spaces and beautiful places for people to live. And because this is church property and and because that you can do it in a nonprofit style, um it can be affordable for people. And you know, there's triplexes, there's there's um there's duplexes, there's there's single family housing on this property. And uh this model particularly um has a maximum of 37 potential units. These are all 30x40 footprints, so 1,200 footprints. Um and it's to scale. Uh, and it includes 17 additional spaces um, including, you know, and it's preserving that parking lot, which that was the one thing that that gentleman said is that that parking lot is used and we want to keep it. So, I'm going to turn it back to uh, Frank for big idea number two. Thanks. So, big idea number two, create mobility options that are safe, connected, and beautiful. And this came up again a lot of times over the course of our week here. Um, one of your citizens said sidewalks are incomplete or they're not functional. And uh, we saw it. This photograph was taken yesterday when we were traveling through the uh, neighborhood, the avenues. Uh, we were just, you know, going through all the different neighborhoods. We've been doing it all week. And here's a perfect example of this uh, woman that couldn't even be on a sidewalk because there is these disconnects. So these are the kinds of things that we heard. We also heard it's coming from your citizens, not us. Streets are ugly. Transit isn't

convenient. It's dangerous to walk or bike. Disconnected. You can only get around the city by car. And Lamar University is very remote from downtown. And it's really funny because we heard that a lot. And so we just did a little Google. It's three miles away. It's not as far as it sounds. And quite frankly, uh, you don't have to be in a car to travel 3 miles with other mobility devices. Uh, but you want to be able to make that a comfortable and more importantly safe uh, excursion. So, how do you do that? We start with our sidewalks. And these are some of the principles that make sidewalks better. Make sure they're properly sized, universally accessible, so that woman that we just saw in that wheelchair can easily uh move through your city, having safe connections, clear signage, making them attractive, of course, security, quality, and efficient drainage. We don't talk a lot about sidewalks and drainage, but it's critically important. Um, we want sidewalks to be useful, comfortable, interesting, and safe. That comes from uh a quote from uh Jeff Spec. For those of you that have not heard of him, he wrote the book on walkability. He revolutionized this concept and and if you are interested in in following up on on these ideas, I I would recommend you getting his book. Um, not only from sidewalks, but also what we refer to as complete streets. Complete streets is exactly what it says it is. It's for everybody, not just for cars. It's to accommodate all modes of what we call mobility. Walking is mobility, being in a wheelchair is mobility, riding a bike, it's it's all of those things together. Scooter, on and on and on. Uh and so what we want is our streets to be safe

for everybody. We want to separate bikes from traffic. We want to evaluate uh some two-way traffic uh positions to maybe uh to away from one way. That is referred to as street calming. Lower the the speed, lower the rate of uh serious injury and death. Uh we also want to look at closing system gaps, closing those gaps and ultimately ultimately making the streets beautiful, streetscaped, shaded, lit, and some beautiful materials. And by the way, when we say that um having a nice wide sidewalk doesn't cut it in Texas. What we need in Texas are trees. Shade makes all the difference and and makes that walk not only comfortable but desirable. If you can protect yourselves uh with shade, that's the ultimate way of being able to get through a city. So, um just a couple of examples of what that could look like here in our own town. This is Pearl Street. I also want to uh say something else about um um public uh we talk about cities your city and basically every city we say that cities are the largest property owners in the cities that they they're in and it's not they're the largest property owners because they own city hall and the library. It's that's not the square footage we're talking about. We're talking about the public right away. When you add all that up, you all as a city are by far the largest land owner here. And it's a public right away. And so that's why we do talk about it being for everyone. And again, here's a good example. We're heading toward the Gilbert building, which is really wonderfully being restored. It's great. Continue to spur development, but also

how are there other ways of being able to walk in uh this area of downtown? And you can see shade, protected bike lanes, and cars still get to drive through. And it's for everyone's. Another example we looked at was uh Calder coming from uh Oldtown here, some of the streets. And the idea of the widths that you have by looking at what we call a road diet is not going to significantly affect a vehicle, but it could conceptually uh bring in other modes of transportation. And by the way, that's something we heard a lot about. A lot of your your traffic is becoming more and more congested. So, by looking at uh complete streets, you're taking people out of cars. Maybe that three mile drive from Lamar, maybe it's not a drive anymore. And if you're providing safe ways for people to get around, you are reducing your traffic, uh which makes everybody happier. And so something like this could become that. We have another example here of Laurel today heading downtown. three lanes. Well, maybe just a little bit more and being able to provide a safe route for everyone. Um, these are just some examples. Also, we looked at Magnolia, but we looked at it in sections because of the uh the various um uh ways that you travel on the street. And again, these models, and we use these models, and we we'll be identifying other routes, but we just want to give you an example of uh some of the things we're going to be looking as we continue to draft this plan. and uh and and be able to do that. Uh so what we're talking about is having a connected and active network that eliminates those gaps, creates safe

crossings, expanding your greenway and trail. It's not just doing facilities on the streets, but if we get it right, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in the parks green green belt uh section, but if we get it right, uh you can travel very protected on a greenway, a belt, a drainage ement, other ways of moving through the city. and we're going to be looking at that as we develop this plan as well. But yes, also establish separate and protected bike lanes. We heard a lot about people saying, "Yeah, bikes aren't going to work here because it's very dangerous." And you know, a stripe in the road is dangerous. I'm a cyclist. I mean, I I prefer to have a protected buffered lane than just a stripe in the road between me and a 6,000 pound vehicle, right? And then there's also some really good programs out there. We talked about the railto trail uh programs which do that. You work with your rails and uh and drainage canals. There's so many different possibilities that exist within your community uh that you can turn into assets for mobility. And then lastly, we wanted to talk about mass transit. We heard about uh weights for buses uh uh not being able to get around other than the car and not only you know working with your your public transportation system but also there's many new uh ideas that are coming up uh primarily uh uh things like the Uber buses that are now available in cities. Uh lower left these little electric um vehicles. By the way, this is a very successful project that UTSA in San Antonio is doing in its downtown. You can pick up your phone, you can text, and one of these will come and pick you up and take you around, by the way, free of charge. They do it with advertising. So, there's a lot of new innovative ideas of other ways of getting around other than just being in a car. So, that's what we're talking about. Our goal is to move people through our city,

not only with cars. We're not against cars. We're not We're not pledging a war on cars. We're trying to make it less uh congested and give people opportunities to move around without just having to be in one. So that's idea number two. Idea number three. Hi everyone. Big idea number three, increase access to parks and nature. So, we heard um that earlier this week um better connect parks, neighborhoods, and schools through the trails and greenways. Okay. You know, the first thing we think about when we're doing a comprehensive plan, well, I should say a good comprehensive plan recognizes existing adopted plans that the city already has. They put through forth a lot of effort already into creating these plans. So, a comprehensive plan should support those. Uh, one of them, of course, is the parks for all master plan that was done recently that was approved last year. And going through it, I was very impressed. Um, it's got a lot of information. It's a and it's a great resource uh for Bumont when it comes to the park systems. You know, it's a it's a long range guide for investment and development. um it helps for improvements throughout the the future, you know, next five to 10 years as well as uh developing it. It had a an extensive community engagement portion which kind of what we were doing this week as well. So when thinking about that, some of the goals and objectives of that plan we completely agree with and we felt that it was important to to announce was it covers a lot of investment in the park system. It also in it also mentions equity and accessibility, expanded programs, safety

and comfort maintenance and modernization of exist existing parks. It also outlines the existing city parks about 39 of them. As you can see in the map, um the plan outlines that there are located a little bit more central, but there are some that are kind of spray us spaced out a little bit. And that's kind of when you can lean into connecting. How can we connect a lot of these parks together and still utilize some of the existing environmental resources of Bowmont? So, looking at one of the activities that we did um a few days ago, the visual preference survey, we tallied up the the numbers of green dots which people agreed or wanted in in the city. And the top three are are kind of on the top row. um a park near a river, the riverfront. You have in the middle a parking a park for gathering more neighbor neighborhood gathering and then a protected uh bike lane. So you're you're kind of looking at a riverfront um something that that utilizes existing environmental resources. You have a gathering spacing connecting parks as well as a way to get to these which would be a connection of a of a protected um uh you know driveway or space that sounds awfully awful lot like a greenway. So a greenway um connects off-street paths for walking, biking and wildlife mobility kind of what we touched upon already. It also enhances ecological, social, and economic value. You know, it's a great way to travel from one end of the city to another and in between that being able to connect to different parks along the way. Uh, a big a big item we're look

we're discussing is connection connecting from the riverfront to downtown and and Collier's Ferry Park. So, we're looking at two potential greenways that will bring people from the north and from from the south southern part straight to downtown the riverfront of Bulmont. This is a great way to do it. So, for example, the first um looking from the riverfront park going up north to Collier's Ferry, you know, it can highlight a lot of the good environmental resources that Bowmont has. It's a comfortable ride. Uh walking, it's also like a a tourist uh attraction as well. So, it does help a lot. Going from going south now, going from Riverfront Park, you can also access to Terrell Park to the cat the cattail marsh. Um this could be easily achieved in a similar fashion, biking. Um the you know, there's no way to do this currently, but this is something that could that could uh be in the future. A good example is a Coyotto greenway trail in Columbus, Ohio. That one includes a green whale, a greenway of about uh five miles. And throughout those five miles, it connects to three um city parks. It also connects to a bicesentennial fountain, a community center, and then a pool. Something like this can get funded in in numerous ways. It can be um through uh grants. It can be a public private partnerships and there's mult there was multiple ways. Now, thinking a little bit more of a in a smaller setting, you know, you don't always have to do the large um you know, the large pathways, but to preserve a lot of the resources, but you can also

um looking at it from a subdivision standard a way of thinking. when you're doing a development, especially along the northwest portion of the city, um developers, you can kind of tend to go with the traditional subdivision, which is creating um a lot of lots, kind of having them all together, uh you know, not much space, but or connectivity. Uh but another way of looking at that is what we call a cluster, a cluster design, a cluster subdivision. By doing that, you can utilize preserve the existing uh environment, especially in that area to the north. Um by kind of creating a little bit of a an easement boundary around the residential properties. Um that could be done through incentives to kind of help um yeah to kind of help quality of life for those residents. It's almost like going out in your backyard and instead of seeing like another neighbor, you see um trees, you see kind of an access to a trail um which you know which would be great. So how could what can that look like here in Bmont? Again mentioning the Northwest Parkway area, there's currently vacant vacant land green area. The way to go about that is first by installing and establishing infrastructure the streeting streets and connect connectivity to it. Then you can start phasing out into different developments that bring more attention and and more economic development into the area as well as proceed to residential uses. One thing to keep in mind is creation of larger adequate open space. That's something we kind of heard a little bit about in our meetings. Um, yes, developments can include um open spaces. Sometimes there's like a lot of units and they have a smaller space. So,

creating adequate size units for the development is pretty key. By looking into that a little bit further, it can be used in multiple ways. Multi-use park areas. Um it can be used for of course gathering for events and overall you know a qu better quality of life. We also heard bring bring back the downtown by embracing the river. The river is a pretty it holds a key role and actually you know a good it's it's embedded with the the city. Um, it's represented in numerous ways, art, documents, imagery, and even visitors as well. One thing we think about when we come to Bowmont is the river. It's a part of Bumont. So, you know, it's one one benefit would be to maybe look into revitalizing the riverfront and that can include different different options, you know, creation of a marina, informal uh restaurants, boat repair. I know this was done in the past, but you know, it's time to possibly work, revisit it. So, what can that look like? Well, you know, we were staying um kind of by city hall this week and we looked around and we saw a few surface parking areas that were underutilized. And by re reimagining those by relocating parking elsewhere, you know, we could repurpose that area to a park that can be used, activated, and attract people toward that area from different parts of the city. To complement that, we can expand going further and having a larger area uh with parks and water features. um really is creating a a a connection from downtown to the riverfront park area. A lot of times, you know, there's not much activity going on or people wanting to

go there because there's really nothing to do there. By creating a a reason for people to to visit, um a great a great use of this area since it's along the river is park parks and open space. Again, it can be used in multiple ways. gathering events, leisure, you know, improves quality of life that ties in with those um greenways that we mentioned beforehand. So now I'll pass it on back to Sam. Thanks, Alfonso. Okay, big idea number four, plan a prosperous city for everyone. One of the things we heard is, I think residential is the big missing. It's the fastest way to revitalize your neighborhood. Now, in Bulmont and everywhere in the United States, we tend to build um two kinds of housing. We have detached single family homes and we build those big block uh mid-rise apartments. Um I'm pretty sure that's common here, too. You know, you see that a lot. Um especially on the northwest side. We went up there and saw a lot of that. There's there's all kinds of uh different housing options that that you could build here. Um and they can be uh context appropriate. Um, and you know, Bowmont's boom was was in the 20s when when we we built a lot of these things, right? So, these are context appropriate in in Bowmont. These could take the the shape of all different kinds of of uh units. You could you could still do your single family detach. Nobody's telling you not to buy one of those, but just provide options, right? Um, you could do, you know, single attached town homes, duplexes, accessory dwelling units. You can do three triplexes, quad plexes, bungalow courts, things like that. Um, there's also mixed use, lots of mixed use options you can do and we we've heard a lot of that. Uh, and how to create those mixeduse options. How would this look? Uh, we have a street here on Brandon A, and you can really sort of it's an unbuilt property. You can really start incorporating a lot of those different

housing types into here. there's options that you have and it it's financially it's it makes it more financially feasible for a developer to put multiple units on there. It's a way to incentivize these things. So there's lots of options that you can do with uh creating these things and and after housing it there there comes you know complimentary uses and and really what we're talking about is just that neighborhood commercial. It's taking these really cool and this was obviously a commercial structure before um whenever that was when whenever it has seen its heyday and it's revitalizing that. It's bringing it back to those traditional neighborhood designs. There's a lot of tools and strategies to do this. Um, update regulations, a unified development code would be one of those. Uh, formbbased controls, you know, not maybe maybe the use doesn't matter so much. Maybe just the way the building looks. That's what formbbase at its core really is. Um, you know, pre-development meetings, having more dialogue between the city and and people who are trying to do these things. It's it's those things that dialogue provides education and expectations that way and and you know you start building that trust once you start doing this over time trust is built with consistency. That's what essentially these tools and strategies are. It's a way for for staff and for for for people for residents to really to to understand how things work and if it if it consistently happens over time then that's what builds that trust. We have all these properties and we don't know what to do with them. Something that we heard, you know, we people inherited, we can't find these property owners. There's just these vacant lots that nobody knows what to do with them, you know. Somebody inherited it and we can't find that error, you know. Yeah. I mean, we we we heard that a lot. It's it's it's a big uh it's preventing a lot. And I hope everybody brought drank their coffee this morning because I'm just going to talk a little

bit about law right now. Technically speaking, Bowmont cannot land bank. It is uh it is not big enough. You have to be over a million people to land bank. Effectively though, Bumont can land bank. There are sections of the of the state law that would allow you to create nonprofits and corporations uh and that would allow you to to effectively lamb bank. It's a process. It's a big lift. This articles of incorporations that you see here is from uh Houston in 1999. They did this. They called it the land assemblage redevelopment authority. That was their authority to do it. They created a local government corporation and they they adopted certain financing rules. Um and this was done in 1999. It was a long time ago. Uh the current land banking uh state code was was drafted in 2007. So this was before the urban land banking was even really a concept in Texas. There's another option to do it as well. Um you can you can convey the properties to nonprofits. You can find a partner. um to do it. It's a it's a it's a long process. There's a lot that that goes into it. You know, you have to choose that vehicle option one or two. You have to define the public purpose. You know, taking v re repurposing vacant land, you know, revitalizing neighborhoods, things like that. Um these are you'll be drafting those charters. You'll do that. Uh it's important interlocal agreements. you have to, you know, enter into agreements with with the counties, with uh with the school district, any taxing units, anything that that levies taxes and that has the ability to foreclose to to uh to take that property. You'd have to set acquisition rules, right? You know, the you know, how these how the city or this this nonprofit, how who whatever vehicle you choose acquires these lands. And then you have to set really transparent disposition rules, how it sells, right? This is where a lot of communities get in trouble about how they how they get rid of these

properties and who gets these properties. As long as you're transparent, you'll be fine. There has to be governance and accountability. You have to have a body that meets. It has to be public. It has to be uh sub, you know, it has to have open meetings. They have to be recorded. Things like that. And finally, the first step and really the last step is to prove the concept. Start small. do it once or twice. Scale it up. The first year you're you're doing all these other things. You're it takes a long time to do a lot of this stuff. It's going to take it's a process, but you can you can do this in the first year and then by year two you can start maybe start moving some properties. This is this is just one avenue. It's a possibility. So big idea number five, leverage heritage and leverage your heritage and institutions as an engine for innovation. So we heard this from one of the participants. Quality of life is what determines whether students graduate and leave or stay and contribute to the city's future. We're talking about Lamar. It doesn't feel like a college town. And then we put this at the end yet. So, you know, a lot of college towns, they have these, you know, this micro urbanism, this this these like little tight-knit areas around these colleges. You see it in Paris. Uh you see it in Cambridge. You see it in Providence, Rhode Island. Um, but I think a a model that that can be easily adapted here uh is is Norman uh Norman, Oklahoma. Their college district started with one corner, just one little corner of uh of shops and restaurants that created this lively campus life. Uh we went to Lamar uh we looked around. There is on the very uh northwest corner there uh northwest piece of uh the campus there is this corner on Jimmy Simmons in East Slovakia. It's empty. There's nothing there right now. What if you can create that lively corner right there? Maybe that's all you need. Maybe that's the first step. There's offices, there's apartments,

there's shops, there's on street parking, you have safe crosswalks. That's important. Building on what what Frank was talking about on complete streets. You have to have those street trees. You need that shade. It's hot. Gets hot here. It was hot yesterday. It's February. Uh and you know, the the street life would be lively. You would see these things and and you know, it it would be welcoming and it would be fun and it would be inviting. And then you can create a trolley. All right. You can you can increase those mobility options that we talked about earlier. Uh once once you have more people who are willing to go downtown and are go to Lamar and go to different places, you can create that trolley that sort of acts as like a dedicated circuit to from to and from Lamar wherever that may be. So resilience is a big component of this plan and we talked a little about economic resilience earlier and and and how you know improving certain things can lead to to better city functions and to a more diversified economy. Um but our our our colleagues at PTA you know they really put together a lot of uh infrastructure um resilience themes and you know they talk about how aging infrastructure uh affects reliability and maintenance. They talk about how uh you know the desire for infrastructure enhances the quality of life. They also talked about that a lot of utility capacity here supports these ideas. There's a lot of good infrastructure here already. uh tagging on to what uh Alfonso was mentioning, you know, when you're creating these parks and you're creating these trails, you know, you can integrate uh detention and you can you can do a dual purpose, right? You can create a trail, you can create a park that service that also services as a as a detention pond when it floods. You might not be able to use it for a weekend or a week, but once it dries up, you can you can go back to using it again. And and there's there's funds available if you have that infrastructure, right? you can build a park effectively with funds that are

meant for for resiliency projects. Um the the water system here, we learned about how uh you know the infrastructure has varying ages. There's there's uh there's a demand and increasing in older segments, right? Uh but there's there's some capacity concerns around the edges and and we learned a lot about that. Um but the system reliability does support the economic development goals as we mentioned earlier. Uh we talked about how the gravity sewer system and then it's serving established old uh older neighborhoods. The aging pipes contribute to maintenance and concerns, right? The uh the lift stations are are critical during heavy rain events. Um so there's there's a lot of of infrastructure that's going to go into this this plan and some goals and recommendations that are going to come out of it. Uh, as Frank mentioned, as you as we as we implement these these uh complete streets, you know, as we're doing these things, you can coordinate your water improvement efforts as well with these street constructions. You can you can do uh two things at once. Two birds with one stone, if you will. Uh, and you can enhance that redundancy and resiliency and and and and correct kind of water planning. the um you know a lot of the you know it's important to prioritize re rehabilitation of aging sewer mains right this is going to be a big component of this plan uh improving lift stations as I mentioned in the previous slide is going to be a big thing uh and and aligning uh the sewer capacity and planning with what we what our land use components of this plan is going to be uh so flood m all these things you know flood mitigation these things we're talking about they enhance the resiliency of neighborhoods the stability of neighborhoods. Um this coordinated infrastructure improves investor confidence. This these things lead to economic development as well. Strong infrastructure creates economic development. Uh uh the capital improvement planning, you know, that's going to be a big component of this. Um the asset

prevention and system reliability, capacity and targeted growth areas, multi-use and community enhancing projects. This is what we've been talking about. Uh you know, drainage, drainage is a big big issue here. Uh older neighborhoods were developed before modern detention standards. Um you know there's reoccurring localized flooding constantly. Uh and the community preference is for functional but visually integrated solutions. These this is what we heard during our focus groups about infrastructure. What is that um what does that uh functional but visually integrated? You know that looks like this. There's bio swells. There's there's there's uh bio retention basins. There's tree filter pits. There's all kinds of things you can do. Porest pavement. Um, constructed wetlands. Cattail Marsh is a constructed wetland and it and it acts it's it's amazing. It's we went there yesterday and we got to see alligators and birds. So many kinds of birds. It was kind of wild actually. I mean, you're doing these things. You already have these assets. You just, you know, you know, just leverage them. Keep going. Speaking of leverage, Lamar University is doing a lot of this work right now. Uh they're they're doing pilot programs for permeable pavement, for rain gardens, for bio swells on campus right now. Uh Lamar University is also um a member of the Southeast Texas Urban Integrated Field Laboratories. There's only four in the whole country. uh and there's one right here in Southeast Texas and Lamar University is a member of that. So they're doing research right now for resiliency there. So when we talk about leveraging that those institutions we're talking about, you know, becoming a partner with Lamar, it just so happens on March 26, I'm I'm giving a plug for Lamar right now that there is a uh resiliency through history

conference. Resiliency through history. I mean, that's kind of what we've been talking about through this whole whole sharet, right? And Lamar's Lamar's doing it, too. They've recognized it as well. Um, there's a lot of opportunity for collaboration with the university. Speaking of which, we heard this from a resident. I would love to see a satellite campus, a Lamar satellite campus downtown. Makes sense. Makes a lot of sense. A lot of cities do this. Okay. in um Winston Salem in North Carolina. They took a tobacco factory and they turned it in they turned it into Wake Forest's Innovation District. Um it, you know, that's that's a lot, right? That's a huge facility, a lot of investment. Doesn't have to be that big. Sacramento State took a empty 3,000 foot office, turned it into their school of public affairs. Now it's become a lively little node of downtown. Flint, Michigan, took an empty building, turned it into their culinary arts institute, gave it a facelift, makes it great, and even put there's there's a little test kitchen there with u where you can eat uh at times. So, these are ways that, you know, you can it's it's demonstrated to be effective in other parts of the country. So, we'll leave you here with um what we saw what we say is become city makers. You know, we we always um in in these presentations with with with our with our call to action, you know, our plan for active transportation, our support support local um events and and activities and our your economic development, you know, empower yourself with data, cultivate arts and and and cultural community. We always, this is our call to action for every community, but we don't really have to do that here in Bulmont. You're already doing it. you're already doing it pretty well and you already recognize that.

I want to remind everyone that uh we have uh the website planbumont.com. There's a community survey up until uh March 20th. And um all these slides, everything that we've been talking about this week, we're going to put up onto this website. uh you'll be able to see every every focus group slide. Um and uh any upcoming events and dates u are going to be up there as well. So I'd like I have a request for everyone to pull out their phones and to scan this QR code and to tell us if we're on the right track, if this plan is on the right track. Let us know if we have heard you, if we got it right, if maybe we didn't. Maybe we need more. Maybe you're not sure. That's okay. Let us know. Um I'm waiting for everybody see make sure they scanned it. Okay, I think most everyone voted. Okay, that is all that we have for you today and I just want to say thank you so much for having us out. We've had a wonderful

time. Uh staff has been so hospitable and so amazing. Uh same with the the library staff. They were they were great. Um great host as we had our open studio there. So, I'd like for all of us to just give ourselves a round of applause for having a great shet week. Yeah. Uh, thank you so much. Here's our contact information. If you'd like, feel free to send us an email. Uh, if you have any questions, let us know. You can also contact us on the website. Thank you.