Town Center Economic Development Commission - Special Meeting

no afternoon evening awesome just want to kick us off here again welcome to this amazing event put on by an amazing committee led by chairman James Michelle we raise your hand and the committee please raise your hand those folks right there in the corner have been working diligently in the last several months what it's been like eight months or so mons on this amazing Urban plan and this Visionary product for the town of Bloomville this has been a long time coming and so I do want to extend my appreciation to each member volunteering your time to work with our amazing Consultants Gman New York to craft this huge vision and so I just wanted to make sure that you guys were acknowledged we extend our gratitude and your hard work we um are very very excited to receive this for consideration at the counc level but tonight is about our public weighing in on the plan that we're so excited to present to you where is the current council members I saw some of them Council mlar councel Oliver Council Waterhouse did I see the deputy mayor Deputy Mayor Harrington this Council and Council Merit long time coming right sir this has been a long time coming this Town Council has been extremely diligent in making State Grant funds of $250,000 outside of our local dollars to make sure we were able to hire some crafty and some amazing Consultants to put forth this work product towards you for this consideration of the public and so please share all of your ideas please weigh in please take notes please grab some water let's settle in this is exciting and I can't wait to share this with you so again thank you to our commission for your hard work and go York I will

thank you mayor I appreciate the kind introduction uh for the record my name is Donald Poland I am with the firm of Gman York I have a number of Gan York staff with me tonight if they could just raise their hands thank you guys uh everything they do in the background and in the foreground uh make me look good so we we've been working on what is essentially a town center Economic Development strategy and it includes a state authorized Municipal development plan uh so that if the town chooses it can actually uh go down the path of being active in the development process I know there's been really high demand this evening for the handouts uh that we had and that we ran out of of I just want to make everyone aware that they are available or will be available by tomorrow online at Bloomfield c.gov sltc DC uh so don't feel like you missed out you will be able to access the full presentation that I'm giving here tonight uh the first kind of half or two-thirds of this presentation is uh kind of background information some of it you saw before if you were with us at the September kickoff and we kind of go through the process the data analysis and what's gotten us to this point the last third of the presentation starts more uh focuses more specifically on preliminary recommendations and strategies and ideas for the Town Center that being said I want to temper expectations a little bit I would call

this kind of an 80% point in the process uh now everything's been fleshed out not everything has the detail uh and there are probably things that will end up in the draft plan that aren't there now the reason for this is we're still gaining public input so my presentation's probably going to take about 40 minutes and then I'm going to open it up to you the audience for questions and answ answers uh with myself about the presentation the plan and get additional feedback from you I was just informed that the uh the handout document is now available online I'll repeat it again Bloomfield c.gov sltc DC is where it's available thank you for that so to refresh memor project uh overview essentially it's an economic development plan and a chapter 132 Municipal development plan for the Town Center nobody can see this yes I know that and that's why there was the handouts that's why they are available online we went through this in this room previously unfortunately the size of this screen doesn't facilitate the full size of the room I will tell you everything that's most important on this screen as I go through I talk in detail about the items on it so I I ask that you try not to feel left out the other thing is I one two three four five front row seats still available some second row seats still available if you wish to move forward uh so a big part of this was Community engagement I'll go through what we've done so far in the of community engagement to identify Economic Development goals and

strategies to analyze zoning to look at comprehensive do a comprehensive market analysis of the Town Center to also analyze past and current plans uh to look into business and development attraction to provide conceptual plans and Designs focused on interconnections of the Town Center area and to produce bed a reality based plan that is achievable at the end so for reference this is the Town Center the area that we are studying give context the rail line provides the easn boundary there is one parcel on winberry that is east of the rail line that's included in the focus area go to of theer goang is at the star right there in the center so some of the things we looked at first and we did discuss back in September but I want to refresh your memory is basic demographic and socioeconomics of of the town this ultimately plays into kind of the market and what can be expected of being achievable within the Town Center one of the best pieces of news for Bloomfield uh is the fact that from 2010 to 2020 the town grew in population by 5% in the world of demographics and

especially in the world of Connecticut demographics that is a really good thing uh Connecticut only grew by 1% over that time period and most of the rural counties withfield county middle sex County uh New London County talin County Windham County they all lost population at one or two% Harford County only grew at 1% Fairfield County had the best results at 4% but actually Bloomfield grew at a rate of 5% and that's a meaningful growth rate and a really good growth rate in a state like Connecticut that is seing very much stagnant population growth that being said the population pyramid on this side as you will notice you're kind of a little top heavy compared to the bottom that is you are aging we do have to take into account that you do have some facilities like duncaster and seab that may be skew your age a little bit um but overall uh and we'll see elsewhere you are an aging Community it's actually here where we have median age by race you see the median age of the white population is actually 63 Pacific Islanders is 70 uh in the towns overall median age is 49.7 by way of comparison the state of Connecticut's median age is 4 1 and the United States median age is 39 so that starts showing us that Bloomfield is definitely older than other places on the left hand side is an analysis of the population by race and ethnicity and ultimately you are one of the most

diverse uh populations within the greater Harford region one of the most diverse communities we also took a look at uh housing stock comparatively the town of Bloomfield on the left compared to Harford County on the right and ultimately your housing stock kind of mirrors that of the county it's not very different so the percent of single family detx versus two family three family multifam and so forth for market analysis one of the first things we look at is actually employment numbers uh labor force and employment because jobs and especially job creation are the primary driver of Demands for physical re uh real estate whether it be housing whether it be uh commercial space job growth is what primarily drives demand along with population growth so in looking at that considering once again the kind of stagnation Connecticut has experienced over the last 30 years in the context of growth Bloomfield fars okay not going to get overly joyous about it uh the year-over-year though for the past year from August 23 to August 24 there was a contraction in your labor force but the good news is you contracted less than uh the Harford labor market itself so that's a good thing I'm not surprised by that data at all and the unemployment rate is actually very low uh Bloomfield runs a little bit higher than the Harford labor market which is 3.5% unemployment the states 3.4 and Bloomfield is

3.7 uh all in all all three of those are actually very low unemployment rates we also took a look at rents across commercial real estate asset classes including industrial properties office properties and Retail industrial is probably the least of our interest in the context of the Town Center I don't think we're seeking any industrial uses for that location uh office is of interest and Retail is of interest in the greater Harford Marketplace not speaking specifically to Bloomfield uh but since covid-19 and the shift to remote and hybrid work we have seen a real kind of collapse in the commercial office space uh it's worse it's the worst in kind of the downtown central business district with the large office Towers it's been really challenging in the North Harford Market in the context of commercial office parks in the context of Bloomfield uh I think you have fared better based on the age the style the type of office development you have the fact that the sigma large development is owner occupied not a leased property and we see your rents uh performing at around $21 a square foot versus the regions at uh $20 a square foot so I'd say in general right now you're office Market is relatively stable comparatively the retail Market throughout the region has been challenged retail started being challenged back in around 2009 during

the Great Recession uh and ultimately the disruption of uh e-commerce and online uh purchasing taking a big a small chunk but a big enough chunk out of the marketplace to start impacting uh bricks and mor their retail so we see about 16% of retail trade occurring online these days and that's been enough to weaken the marketplace between let's say probably 2012 and around 2020 the pandemic uh the retail sector was really struggling it was trying to find its way the pandemic did it no favors and we saw the collapse of any chains we saw the collapse of regional malls uh and ultimately arrived in a place where now we're starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel things are looking to stabilize a little bit in the retail world and your rents are running a little bit below the region so the region average rent is $18 a square foot and Bloomfield is just shy of 17 a square foot now remember those a those are averages so I'm quite confident there are you know rents probably as low is $8 a square foot at locations in town and there are rents that are higher probably up in the low $20 per square foot uh within town for us in kind of the work we're doing and looking at development or Redevelopment opportunities within the Town Center achievable rents become a very import number because new construction costs money and therefore uh you need to be able to hit a certain

level of rent to actually make that new construction viable and I'll talk a little bit more about that later on we also took a look at things like traffic counts within the core of the center you have a number of roads that come together here Park Avenue tfield 8553 6200 parav and 2500 on jome in the context of ret detail uh traffic counts become really important and in the world of national chains like just to say if we were trying to recruit a Panera let's say they typically won't look at a site that has counts less than 16,000 or 15,000 so this is where town centers can become challenging it's the main arterials it's the shopping districts the places like Buckland Hills and so forth or the busy all materials and we'll look at something U to provide some context to that in the moment we also did a visual inspection survey of properties within the town center that is we go out we have a rating system on we have a system of how to analyze the appearance of buildings the conditions of buildings and then we rate them and at the end of the day the Town Center for me kind of says Miss sends Miss mixed messages in the context of its

appearance of exterior building quality some buildings are very wellmaintained and show very well and some properties are poorly maintained and don't show show very well and that is essentially from my perspective a market mixed message there's some investment going on that we have to be happy about and thankful for uh but there's also deferred maintenance going on in a lack of investment and that starts to inform Us in certain ways and I'll get back to that in a bit so to show the difference between kind of a functioning maybe retail location and a challenged Town Center location and that relationship between uh that relationship with traffic counts we did a Geo fencing analysis it's a software product that allows us to capture data from cell phones basically you're walking around with this thing it's pinging off of cell towers and it knows where you are at every minute and we have access to a software product that allows us to draw lines polygons around certain locations and then it tells us uh how many people were actually at that location in the given time frame that we ask it to so how many people visited this property in the past year or in the past week or what is the busiest time so we did a comparative analysis of winberry with the capaco shopping center they're both shopping centers uh capaco is a little bit larger but maybe some similar square footage and wanted to see what that would actually inform us I didn't include the map here so I'll give one thing away up front is uh the

traffic counts out on uh out in front of capaco run around 14 to 15,000 versus the kind of high of 9,000 we're seeing in the Town Center so comparative annual visits on an hourly basis time of day uh kacos in blue town center or winberry is in Orange and that's the Stark difference the attendance at the winberry property the visitations on the yearly basis are about 177% of the visitations to Taco and that I can use as a metaphor then for the center in general of kind of that effect that traffic counts have on economic Vitality of properties we also wanted to see kind of a trade area for the center um where are people coming from so we dropped Geo fences on three restaurants uh one was Republic which is shown here the next one's going to be Carbones and then Elizabeth's and we recognize them as vibrant establishments we recognize them as having name recognition uh within the community and Beyond and we wanted to see where were people coming from so for Republic the majority of vations from 10 different zip codes and those zip codes are shown there so there's people coming from Southfield in South Wier and West Harford and my geograph Avon simsberry Grand and the largest number of visitations are actually coming directly from Bloomfield as I said we also looked at

Carbones similar uh in what we're seeing here May a little bit of shift picking up a high turnout coming from Enfield subfield dropped out but still West Harford Avon Simsbury uh South Windsor or Windsor and so forth and the largest visitations once again coming from Bloomfield the map or the trade area for Elizabeth's changes a little bit it becomes a bit more ated by a Bloomfield uh trade area that more it's serving Town residents more than um than regionally but we still see a regional draw pushing into Windsor South Windsor down into Harford East Harford and oddly enough in the top 10 is a zip code from New Britain uh a bit distance there but there's some type of connection there that's actually drawing people uh to it so for us the big big picture of this tells us that Bloomfield Center does have a draw it can draw Beyond just the town uh and that's important it's hard to have a vibrant Town Center just based on the town alone that may have been possible 50 years ago or more but in today's day and age We Exist at a metropolitan scale and therefore this kind of regional trade area becomes important a little bit about our community engagement our kickoff meeting was held September 24th I know many of you were here because I'm recognizing faces in October we engaged in a number of focus groups we met with small businesses major employers Town staff and agencies boards and

commissions uh a group at the senior center or a group of senior citizens uh we also met with Rel leaders in the community we met with high school students and we did a focus group with the residents of arloom flats as a way of targeting the residents you know that live here in the Town Center itself in addition we were asked by both seber and duncaster to do presentations at their facilities which we did at the end of those that September 24th public meeting uh we asked you to participate in a number of activities and I'm just going to touch on some of the activities uh that we use and some of the findings to kind of shape how you the public have been informing us so we had continuums of change and we posed questions like do you want development in the town center and to the left is less development to the right is more development and I think in that has kind of sent us a pretty clear message that you do the next question do you want the Town Center to change no change or more change once again more change was favor we get to question three what does the Town Center need more of Redevelopment or new development and you can see here that you spread your answers out across the continum for me this is very informative I I can start reading kind of how the community feels about things what interesting I'm going to jump to question five here uh what do you want to see in the Town Center more restaurants or more retail we justos some different things against each other and there was a favoring towards restaurants and the fact is I'm not

surprised by that if you look over the landscape the proliferation of restaurants within our society has been pretty phenomenal over the past three decades um there is a gravitation towards ding we also as what type of development do you want to see in the Town Center residential or commercial more residential I wouldn't pleased with this answer not very much more commercial I'll get back to that because the residential becomes interesting with you guys uh it's going to come up elsewhere so uh what do you prefer one or two story buildings or three or four story buildings one or two three or four so from my perspective whether it's one or two or three or four I'm not really I don't have a preference just in that question but what I do know is you guys do have an aversion to taller buildings I've been jokingly calling it the heirloom effect I think when the heirloom Flats was uh opened I think the community negatively reacted to maybe the height of that building and that's showing still um my challenge is though when I talk about Redevelopment when I talk about softness in Marketplace when I talk about those low rent levels if I speaking kind of collectively for we as a community if the goal is to pull off redevelop replace that are already there with new things then ultimately we're going to need density to help the numbers work so I can't achieve change with just one or

two stories so most of what's in your Center is one story to knock it down and rebuild it as two stories doesn't make sense but if you get three stories or maybe sometimes four stories Maybe sometimes five stories the economics start looking better so I'm preparing you for that uh where do you do most of your shopping in Bloomfield or outside outside blomfield uh I'm still going to come back to the residential at some point we asked the community about investment opportunities and to rank things and you rank Redevelopment of wiry number one walkability and bability number in community events and activities number three community events and activities scor strong across the board and various questions and things that we asked or activities that we did and I'll talk a bit more about that in a bit and you can see the other rankings there um we also had an activity called prows ands we gave you posted notes and told you to tell us what you were proud about in the center and what you were sorry about your pride was in diversity Library the town Green concert the town green that's that activities and events you guys seem to really appreciate and love your town green and that's important to us and that's important to a town center in addition when we asked you what you were sorry about you said things like lack of sidewalk lack of outdoor dining wiry malls not encouraging not no attractions so forth and so on lots of feedback

there we also asked about that existing conditions give us three words that describe the existing conditions empty empty spes boring and we asked about future outcomes what would be words that described the center when it was better or improved and you told us high acity on WE interes beautiful you start seeing differences there this J position between the current conditions and potential future conditions maybe what it is you want out of your town center moving forward we also asked you to invest in the center we gave you money we controlled the amount of money that was in the audience we knew the number of bills of each denomination that were in the audience and then we made you Choose Wisely on what to invest in arts cultures and events rank number one walkability and bikability rank number two and mix use development rank number four if you remember the previous top three and the different activity were Redevelopment walkability and community events so community events in walk ability actually score twice across two activities in the top three and a bunch of other things falling behind questions about housing I told you to come back to residential r a bit lower again uh I think I come back to housing again so then we met with focus groups and we asked them a lot of questions we had very good discussions to try and get their feedback as kind of key stakeholders within this and

uh the small businesses said the Town Center is a symbol of the whole town so it's important that it is beautiful and I agree they also reminisced about a time gone by in the Town Center when it was much more maybe beautiful as they put it the major employers talked about struggles with the Town Center that it's not a place they end up sending clients and visitors to that usually when asked about things to do or places to dine and so forth that they're more likely to send their business colleagues their clients and so forth elsewhere and they emphasized how important it is for the center to be kind of that vibrant Place U that they could send people to Town staff and agencies talk to us about where people families and children gather is what determines the down the town center and residents here are proud to be from Bloomfield the seniors provided once again perspective uh they looked at the community as kind of the East West divide a theme we have heard over and over in this activity and in other activities we've engaged in uh they all had very positive memories of blomfield and they're concerned that the community doesn't gather like it used to and that's a theme that we see throughout the work we do throughout Society there's a famous book written a number of years ago Robert putam and bowling alone that talk about the loss of those Civic and social spaces uh the religious leaders uh made it clear the churches were happy to be

involved they made it clear that these changes in society and How We Gather have affected them how they have to look and engage their communities differently and they also were concerned uh about the windberry mall uh and its role within the center the most interesting and exciting and positive focus group we had was with the residents of uh herir flat really caught me off guard they love Bloomfield Center they did recognize the challenges they did recognize the negatives that the rest of you have recognized but they also had a very positive perspective they love to walk they love to walk their dogs they love to go to all the small locally owned business is when we you know when they were telling us about restaurants and so forth none of them mentioned the three that we had analyzed they mentioned all these other ones and so forth and I had to stop them and say but wait a second do you ever go to the republic or go to this place and they're like oh yeah but our favorite is this uh and so forth so they in some ways were a breath of fresh air and I think that's really important to understand that many of of them are Outsiders they've come from elsewhere many of them are older empty nesters who have downsized and not only do they Embrace their Community within heirloom they embrace the Town Center some of them did express feelings of uh they don't feel like they're welcome within the community overall and some of them recognize that they they may just be projecting them onto themselves uh but in general they love

the CER they love the scale of it the ability to walk and so forth and for us that's a very positive insight and outcome we also did a community survey that was online Alyssa helped me I forgot how many respondents do we have survey respondents 816 I believe responded which I know sounds low to you in the size of your community but actually it is a really good turnout on a survey device uh we were extremely pleased with it so we asked demographic information when were you born I talked about AG before these are all your baby boers so they kind of dominated it this is the respondents in comparison to the percent of population of the town as a whole respondents outnumber in the older ages the percentage of the town and then they drop lower as they get younger than the percentages once again not uncommon uh empty nesters have more time on their hands than maybe 30s somethings with children and those 20s somethings just aren't civically engaged as much as we wish they would be uh time I'm only going to focus on a couple of these do you want more retail or office in the town center and Retail overwhelming do you want the C to change 82% yes do you want improve

81% what needs to change or improve for the town CER VES more retail accessability movie theater you guys really love that movie theater it comes up over and over again uh what types of development would you like to see in the Town Center retail mix office are resal the multifam ranking the lowest I'm still thinking it's not just the height of Loom that multif family may be part of that heirloom effect that I joke about so that's the kind of data we've received so far it's a tip of the iceberg to just kind of bring you up to speed and show you what we've been looking at we've also spent eight nine months meeting monthly or more than monthly with uh the Town Center economic devel velopment committee to present to them all of our findings on our research to discuss with them the importance of all that information and to get their feedback on how they interpret it not just how we interpret it and there's been moments where they've disagreed strongly with our interpretations and it's forced us to rethink things and go back and look at things again so it's been this process of interaction and learning so in this section I'm going to talk a bit about some findings and recommendations just refreshing you on the Town Center as a whole but you're GNA see uh in every community plan that I engage in or anytime I'm engaged by a community to help them improve an area

there's always an area boundary like this but at the end of the day no Community has enough resources to tackle a whole area at once it's just not possible so we end up always finding where are the strengths where are the weaknesses and how can we work in a way that we target efforts I Define investment as time money and energy it's not just money so where can we target our energy where can we target our time and where can we target our investments to make the best Improvement or the most Improvement as quick as possible and as you get those successes you can then start branching out to wider areas so as you're going to see we do kind of Target in on areas of the center overall some of our preliminary findings and some recommendations very high level but macro and microeconomic forces Beyond Blom Fields control contributed to the decline of the Town Center it's not you guys that retail changed it's the fact that buildings that were functional and prosperous decades ago are now verging on functional obsolescence it's the fact that 20 years ago no one sh online right it's the fact that things have changed in the world and the center is challenged and there's many places like that it's not just Decades of change in ret demics and the rise of other locations have resulted in weaker Town Center in a weaker Town Center commercial Market if you think about it when the Town Center you know if you go back 40 years ago on that town center go

back to a time of prosperity where people talked about the vibrancy and the busyness 291 wasn't there buckham Hills Mall wasn't there 291 one's great it connects you to the greater Market that's why we see in those market analysis that people from South Windsor are coming over here to use your Center but at the same time it made it very easy for Bloomfield residents to go to Buckland Hills to do shopping and so forth the weakness in the market has resulted in varying degrees of disinvestment as I told you there's some great success stories in the center there's some well-maintained well-invested properties in the center and there's also kind of disinvestment or stagnation revitalizing the town Cent as much about a psychology of place as it is about physical Redevelopment little market confidence has resulted in stagnation and mixed messages uh we need wins we need positive things uh in multiple ways to kind of grow Pride grow confidence and ultimately leading to Growing market for Bloomfield to succeed to successfully reposition the town Cent for investment reposition the center as a vibrant and prosperous place it must Inspire Pride build confidence and grow demand what I essentially just said so then this requires attention to detail doing the little things well I'm a nitpicker about the little things every Community I work in I give them a hard time about the little things but it's about cutting the grass planting the flowers sweeping the sidewalks Shing so we had a community another Community we

were working in we were doing a town center walk with them and they took us out it was just a few days after a snowstorm and we were walking around on icy sidewalks and I turned to the mayor at one point and said who's responsible for he that go our to crew really well your to crew needs to get out here and clear these sidewalks because this isn't good it's not a it's not safe but B it's not conducive you know to people visiting that space so doing the little things well very important work to make the toal center a focal point of the community you got and that relates to the next one activate the space of the Town Center with events and activities you guys have improved this you guys do more activities in your town center than you previously did but you need to do more of them your community loves your concerts in the park on the green your community loved the food truck event uh the heirloom flance residents love everything you do there the more you give people a reason to be in the Town Center the more likely they will come into the town center and when they go an event in the green they also frequent businesses and this just through our Economic Development work with you guys over the years we know from the small businesses that when there's events there's an uptick and activity in the businesses create a town brand and improve image for me this isn't necessarily A V coming up with a jazzy name for the Town Center although that might be possible that might be part of iming and marketing strategy it's really about creating an image you'll see in some of the design stuff or designer you know

notes areas as gateways how can you create a gateway to exite so that people know that you've now entered the center what is that definable space how do we know we're in room field so that creating an identity and improving it investment real the town has to invest in the public real and we need to find ways to get private property owners to invest in the public real and the fact is there's symbiotic relationship there it's often called public private Partnerships the fact is because of soft market conditions U public participation in private development is most likely needed if you really want to effectuate change when I talk low RS very generally speaking we kind of say if there's going to be new construction you need a minimum rent your Baseline starting points about $30 a square foot and rents are running much lower than that that's the very reason why this stuff is intuitive in some ways we kind of know it but the reason why there's disinvestments in the sector return on rents are s there's not a lot of extra cash to put in buildings after operating in maintenance and Debt Service and so forth and so on so to achieve change uh there will have to be public participation we went back to the Tiff plan in 2020 that we did because the tip District that's taxing from and financing is extremely important to a tool for the community use to help participate in investment you can use

future tax dollars to help fund development whether that be public infrastructure like sidewalks uh or whether that be actual private development like buildings so the tip plan the recommendations from the tip plan are being incorporated as a core set of recommendations this comes from the tip plan where we talked about walks in pedestrian Lighting in bus shelters and other things for the community to invest in in the public realm to improve it to make it more friendly to make it more beautiful and aesthetically pleasing friend of mine once wrote a well respected consultant and friend he once wrote If a revitalization strategy does not take into account that any Town Center subject to Consumer decision making then that strategy no matter how good it looks on paper will run into trouble when it encounters the realities of the marketplace that consumer consumer decision making process we can apply to Consumers specifically whether or not you make a decision to shop in blue Town Center or whether you decide to go to Ln Hills or someplace else that's the consumer decision making process we have choices uh the other side of it is also for the business owners business owner out there where are you going to open your business are you coming to Bloomfield Center or you going some place else that's the decision making process to overcome that to work within that we have to recognize that consumers and investors have choice

that there's competition between businesses but also between locations that Bloomfield competes the center competes with other locations we have to recognize that in order for investment to happen in order for people to decide to come to Bluefield Center or open the business in blomfield Center or do real estate development in Bloomfield Center they have to be confident they have to be confidence in that investment and that requires predictability are not predictable if you don't think that your investment today is going to be worth something tomorrow then you're less likely to invest once again just to be clear investment time energy and money not just money so this is the targeting heiring clat For Better or Worse on five stories for better or worse on the Aesthetics and Design is really an important development to recognize in the center the center was untested for decades for any meaningful large scale development and that Development Group pulled it off and as one of the members of that group recently said to me it's no longer an unproven Market the financial institutions the investors the developers now know Bloomfield you can actually pull off T here right Andel that another application is coming in for the corner of Gab Road it's a tested Market investment is now flowing into the multifam rental

real estate that's a good thing you in the market the retail is still challeng so anyways this area becomes an area of strength for us and opportunity as with this area so we started to focus in kind of Target ideas msal what I want to point to though it's just something that's always challenging a box too these ground things that's the post office Town Hall Library church and other facil church right institutional uses they are great Civic uses they bring people into the center they're part of your community your Gathering your Civic life but they don't produce taxes and they kind of shut down opportunities for future developments so in some ways we have to recognize that there are these kind of limitations but these things are also assets I can't speak more highly about the library uh which will be opening soon in a few months as just a tremendous Community Asset it was an asset before and it's going to be a greater asset now so we kind of took some of those tip ideas we kind of took some big picture things and started thinking about once again further broadening out to the Cent scale reinforcing the need for sidewalks and pedestrian connectivity throughout the center that was the biggest complaint we got from the heirloom flat

people that most of the center sidewalk well and you can walk around but there are gaps there are breaks and they become very very noticeable to The Pedestrian recognizing whale wh Green in trail coming into the center along the rail line vering it through theage and then on so this is another way of conceptualizing the space kind of in totality then L us to start looking at what we identify as sites with potentials or opportunities recognizing the is here but then there's other sites in here that show potential and we could build on strength in the success that's already here so I'll get back to that uh this is the Jerome kind of spine again with us rep building across the street the office building speak about in a moment this being an interesting Corridor and in this sense we started engaging and thinking about streets and streetscapes in Textures in sidewalks and this gets to the little things yes the investment is not a little thing but the little thing is that idea of creating a very aesthetically pleasing and engaging public realm making sure that this is a place that people want to be uh so

discussions a bit about design about building facades these are not recommendations in any way shape or form but showing that buildings regardless of modernism let's say or something more traditional that they can have character which is slight variations in Textures in depth and so forth so I'm not going to judge heirloom but many people in the community have I think what we're trying to get at here is you can create something more interesting um than maybe the flat wall or Surface and if you really stop and look at heirloom the section of the building that's actually a bit larger the section of the building that actually has balconies that becomes more aesthetically interesting and breaks up that kind of long wall in other sections and so forth so the property here I'm going to show you a bunch of diagrams of kind of redeveloped properties please do not think of these as a final designs we call them Plato they're fudge we're still making something out of them but we're trying to explore opportunities we're trying to engage conversation and we're trying to inspire this building actually is interesting it's set back a bit more from the road than heirloom is actually the two wings of the building are a different dep right and it actually lies out well for office buing for conversion to residential and then a few things come into play with it the L has very ample paring it can park a lot more than space actually

reques the two buildings with the split Lobby you could leave one building say office and convert the other to residential you can convert them both to resal you can also add match build line here but you could go higher to get more sare footage on that Edition creating variations in height variations and what we built out concep was a full conversion resal with add that goes add and each could have a dedicated Gage space an additional outdoor uh and it would yield probably about 100 units 99 as shown there so that's a site to consider that's a site that has potential moving forward once again also in the context of that weakness of the office Market uh recognizing that there may be a need to consider an alternative this is just another view of it from an aiel and the two exting building with then new addition in two stories higher just providing some but the interesting thing is that site in the back above the police station and through our research we've been informed of some considerations of maybe the police station at some time goes someplace else that would free up something that is institutional government now to come into the private realm and could be a development site ComEd we con

building uh adding stories to it due to the depth of the building it would require an interior Corridor but we think it could yield trying to remember now I think about 38 units so between these two they went to residential we're not saying they should but we know stronger than commercial and we know the more residents we put in town center the more disposable income and the more consumers for the businesses to strengthen the commercial activity so together they could yield maybe 140 units the other side of Bloomfield a I'll go back to a different image my apologies uh if this islo this is apartment you have five Office Buildings or six Office Buildings set back on that cuck once again playing around with putty to try and look at potentials and opportunities we looked at that site and said what if we put residential in the back left the commercial office out front theoretically you could do thetically you could maybe take some of that office space and relocate as addition to the front but here's a way of rethinking that area once again with a residential bent to provide that density and provide that critical mass of population we also did it for that one little corner site I mentioned it earlier let me go back back

again back to that main map there remember we said the little John there's a little office building on the other of the tracks runting on winberry bu the the small office building there I forget the name of it the Winton thank you I struggle to remember the name of every single building my apologies uh but we took a look at that building it size and massing actually it was evident just from looking at it it would lend itself to residential conversion well office buildings that are not overly deep when they're overly deep you can't get the utilization to the center unless you build like really narrow units that just have windows at one end so certain buildings lay out better for conversion than other build this building uh in our property survey is kind of a little bit tired you know for exterior condition so forth so we wanted to take a look at it and see could it be converted and we did find an additions could be done on it and expand it and you could probably get about 50 or so units at that property we then have gone to a l process and are still going through it looking at the area between winberry Park the green and kind of Jerome and Sen these I really want to caution you with there's really a tendency for viewers to look at these as site plans and kind of proposals for what this will be in the future and it's really for us these are graphic

representations of experim to figure out the financial feasibility of development how many square feet can we get and what does that mean how many stories if it is going to be mixed use how much commercial space versus how much residential space and then a controlling factor with how much of space in general is what are you willing to accept for height number of stories and the number of parking spaces that are also needed to accommodate right so we're constrained by kind of volume and we're constrained by parking so we started playing around and the depot site is interesting that bacon lock for so long but it's very shallow and it's very long and on its own it doesn't function very well as a development site hence part of the reason why it's probably been bed for so long looking at ways could we make that site F larger the only way to do it is we're not moving the rail line we recognize this legislation for reactivating and possibly some uh Griffin line 2.0 maybe call it so we're paying attention to that but how could we get more out of that but to do that your has to move right so we started playing with that we then looked at the winberry side what could you do with that do you tear it down do you only tear down portions of it and save portions of it and how much commercial space is there today how much do we think the market could support in the future going back to the 2012 Town Center plan this kind of groundstone row of fronting residential

sh on Park we're also always suspect of oneid commercial streets it tend to not work well knowing the Town Halls on the South Side what if we C residential here we also know you love your town green you want more activity could we expand it and could we make it a more active space to encourage more concerts or events or other things so this was a starting point and we pushed it out there to the committee we got public comment some was positive some was negative we went back we played with it again played with it more over and over and the most recent rendition of it still being play though because uh we're still playing with this but the idea is the depot lot accommodating parking possibly just a on story deck to get more paring an apartment building and then the redo of winberry into new commerciales and we got some good feedback on those ground kind of blocking s so we SPL them up sideways you access Boulevard that the way there Jerome would do this conceptual of jome here getting rid of thepoke intersection it would push those 8200 the development traic green remaining kind of as it is but with this additional kind of public

entertainment space with resturants that possible including there as a way for us to think about this now we've come to some conclusions uh about 120 units here conceptualized there's 38 units of resal here and there's 885,000 ft of commercial and we've been struggling with commercial space and we think the commercial space is maybe higher than it needs to be so starting playing with maybe Contracting it a little bit not a lot and we're also challenged with parking we just don't have support R by Contra support ret and maybe move some things around this is where then height becomes challenging originally the Brownstones were three stories we did do a conceptual four this one is three and this one is four trying to create differences in as I said this is conceptualized here is three stories but we've now started playing with it at four and five and this is the whole thing if we reduce the commercial a little bit and we add some more residential the numbers work better for this development to maybe start being more feasible financially once again looking at public spaces the park things like Event Entertainment whether it's a gazebo maybe some type of

band stand this is a more focused in on that kind of green and entertainment with the restaurant it IDE cops would have line of sight views to any kind of entertainment activity and another concept on the depot building pushing it back fur connec to theage maybe buies rather than just three stories so once again as I said we're playing around with things uh just another look in on the uh the Brownstones they are conceptualized with accomodating parking under the building meaning these surface lcks would be public parking and accessible to the commercial spaces and the public spaces once again discussions around design architecture uh interaction with the street playing with height not doing the five stories straight up like did but going up two stories then setting back a third story and setting back a four story further so you don't have that wall up so each those upper floors would get smaller this is a three look with a setb and this is a four story look with the setback and that is the end of my presentation I'm sorry I ran a little bit longer than I said but now there's time for you guys to engage me with questions and

answers and ly do you want to bring around the microphone so who's going first there's two side by side over there thank you for the I just want to start byi okay so I think one of the out of clear of theorizing why I think of it goes back to another part of your study was people like theace people like so when theer now you can stand any around visual that when we start taking away public Space by putting in residential it's a l to the resents of the Town don't live so the res of the town

you're talking about to C support May that Financial so I think a lot of those smaller sort of people

you people you know the study itself is a down stud of the num thank you I I hear you on everything this the dialogue we need to have what we need to hear just so you know I I could be up here till past midnight uh with going through data we did analyze just the Town Center we did look at just what was there we have demss I hello I'm Mary laupa and um there's one h word that you've never talked about that's historic and obviously the church is a St building and the Robert's house is St but the the train depot has not been brought up it's not on any of your Maps it's from 1871 nobody knows it they drive by it every single day and because it's historic we should be a to do something and bring it into part of the plan and do something special with it I believe different person okay and uh

just so you know actually very early on we did a our initial SRU found building I didn't know but we had conal incorporating was there a way to use it could it become like or reloc devel that email very at it we're not opposed to I don't think we oppos to I don't think we oppos to going so I think we can figure out a way to work I'm going to do we're going to go with this woman up here in front I'm not going to miss so this is for us at the end of the day's a SYM relationship between commercial and resal there used to be a saying there used to be a saying the industry retail follows rooftops so when developers build big subdivisions then the retail comes into the community behind I would say now that goes both ways yes retail does follow rooftops but rooftops actually follow ret so if you look across America if you look across concut where there are places where there is struggling or failing retail

you are seeing that residential is being incorporated into so for example 300 units of apartment appr s Mall there is developer right now looking atfield sare mall with resal commercial component two things are going on there one is if you can reduce the amount of square footage of the commercial that's supports become aen and both end up benefiting each other the commercial becomes an amen resal and the residential becomes spendable income in the commercial facilities the one last point I'd like to make is commercial real estate is weaker uh to get to the gentlem never but this is the reality uh the reason the market noer supp that commercial and Commercial Will C more to reild or renovate return that's why you have build sitting that's what the market is telling us uh you can't do any meaningful Redevelopment without that's test

it can actually OCC market and you need the resal in the develop and in town I think that most of the develop anding a cment of so I I know that one plan ziss is looking at Z make I think the leadership in the to is and a focus on it I think most resal develop so

thank youed trff to2 we reviewed it yeah was relation to we've reviewed it that's where our traffic counts came from uh we don't see anything we're doing to conflict with what they are thinking of or not thinking of forward the inter inter Direction so my gut would be hopeful that some the pns would possibly CH and yes it's be more tra I'm going you good evening uh when we're talking about the center there's a couple of other things that are near and dear to my heart one is the police station is too small one other is the town clerk's office is too small and we don't need the police station in the center of town we don't need the library that us be the post office in the center of town those properties could become more viable to bringing the center into

more more fruit fruitful work the big problem is the mall uh I think it was 10 years ago it was it was bought by a nut case in California I'm not kidding he was nuts we figured it might be worth a million dollars he paid seven to get rid of that mall somebody's going to have to buy that thing and he's not going to sell it for seven he's going to make a whether we like it or not so that is something we have to consider we want to make changes in the wall the reason why that wall is falling apart is this was a tax write off for this guy in California so he didn't give a rats behind whether or not it did well and I know of several people who tried to rent areas in the mall for the retail and he refused to let them make physical changes to the building so they could bring their business in so all of this is wonderful ideas and I totally agree with 99% of it the 1% I worry about is the town facilities that are going to have to be updated by the way did you know the town clerk's office 10 years ago had 20 years left and I went to see the town clerk a week ago and she said oh we maybe have five now those are records that you cannot throw away so looking at the Redevelopment of the Redevelopment of structure

thank gent gentle Don um broadly speaking uh what are we talking about for time frame to execute this great so time frame on this plan uh within the next two to three weeks we will issue a draft plan to the town center committee they will most likely review and give us any recommendations for changes it will then have to go to a public hearing at that Comm then gets forward to the Town Council will publicar and assumably ADT they could but just saying there would be an adoption there uh if the town were to use the chapter 130 portion of it which is a statutory reference to do a municipal Redevelopment then it needs to go to the commissioner of the EC for sign off and along the public hearing comme and the counil a referral to so we are tting that within delivery within two to three weeks the public hearing process by with the two committees probably March early April and final ex and ready with the plan for probably May and then is your question extending into how long would all this we looking at 10 15 kind how so if all the money were available right now and and everything went perfectly fine

to be honest with you I think a best case scenario is you're looking at three to five years but that's best so I think that five years has to extend out further that being said there are multiple aspects of what will finally be Rec recommended that can start being implemented instantly so long as there's the will and capital to ultimately do it which I believe there is uh but to do a large scale Redevelopment in Center would be a longm process genten the ti next and then sorry going go with that next good morning good morning my name is and I want to congratulate you I think essentially produc something really helpful has a lot of good statistics couple of problems though I was waiting for the number one I'm not sure anybody in this room wants to a development that's by stories it smacks of blue square is not a blue square town that's and your point about mixing residential commercial has some Merit because that is something that's happening all over the state it happened right here in my grandmother where the library is it was a nice little stre of stores Liv in an apartment in the back over one of the stores but you also got to talk about BS and the fact of the matter is that there's a bear in the room and the bear

is very long and the fact of the matter is that I can tell you that to solve that problem alone to Take 5 to 10 years maybe it's not something that's going to happen nobody as Jones said nobody's going to go offer you know 10 15 million with the mon and uh then somebody wants talk to me about eminent domain and I said oh that's nice um excuse me what a PO you have the $7 million that you're going to put in support while you're fighting about the amount because that's what I me to requires a you got to put the amount in support and I don't think this million just for the heck of it going to stick in the fighting about it for the next 10 years so I think there's some I I agree that maybe five years is a couple of small portions of the things we suggest that could be done U but as far as the grand plan which includes went Fair Mall um and by the way a lot of people will realize if somehow this in public I should gentleman in California to be dealt with it's not a strip M it's an H what that means is we used to have entertainment vening right in the center of the age in the mall and there used to be some flowers and gra us used to perodic that still could be develop if everybody had an interest in doing um but the the concern I have is while the overall plan is good I think people have to be deal with deals have to

be let me let me ask you a question how many of the owners of the various properties that are within that plan has anybody talked to about the plan have been discuss there's some that are willing if alternatives are possible there some that are less willing but let me just say can partip ASP add allal oflo about alls that I didn't restants that's why I said most favorable

that's to get a significant portion of this done what Noe discrimination there yes sir can you that I understand particip um will be required to make investments work $ per square foot what does that look like um now from what I know the new development rental at this time about 3,000,000 how public participation so my my comments on public participation is to AC the to were to AC of andever ROV addur basket Anis one is that would not occur in the private Market

ITP isid acquisition whether that subsidizing infrastructure cost but the fact is our numbers right none of this most of this not of most of this would not happen in the private Market without somei gentl here I'm G to do one more after just based I will be Ava if you want R so my name is Brian Bell I'm coming at this from a little different perspective I'm a small bus own we have two locations one in new and one in 42 very um we so obviously it prates metice has in the building built it started with Dr my father purchased his practice and bar H joined him we basically forever moved once I believe when the movie theater went in I don't know the whole hisorical details but the point is it's been here

forever um all of this discussion is both exciting but also kind of concerning as a small business owner I mean there is a ton of um uncertainty and we feel like we're kind of at a stand where we'd like to invest in our business but like I don't even know if we're going to have a building tomorrow like that's not the best way to like into I like some of these ideas but I also don't I think for me more of the concern is how you get from like for us we had we have no plans Mo I know might have time but we have a lot of patients from the town we have a lot of pati from the you know all those places um and we would just need to know like how we're going to go Point without disturbing the care we provide our patients and also like know the cost Associated Ming a dental office are EXE not to hold let me give you answer child believe we also have

toist want out to me to talk with you wrote have to do it I don't uh I'll take one more there was someone over sorry hi I'm Mar practic in the location in the mall and I you know I obviously have concerns as a business owner that my livelihood but I also have concerns for the patients that you um a majority of our patients are they are fter and many of them have mobility issues concerns and so when we look at the designs you know is there going to be for our Pati does the design committee envision our practice as being part of the development or are we going to have to relocate even temporarily elsewhere and how does that impact our ability to provide care because it will interrupt care if reloc even with the we want to make that we can minimize disruption for our patients and

weens Tove forward I just something toow here I've been very intrigued by the new development um as part of the Historical Society I'm not speaking to them but the whry I mean the Windor group is taking old houses anding design keeping some of those houses alive they're not the actual houses but of them and I think out so i' love for us to think outside the a little bit uh not so much Library design but the found ofield and what we have here and I think that