There’s a tension when you are standing at a precipice, peering at the faint vision of a world below you and you know you’re about to jump.
The climb is often long, and for Plant City it has been decades in the making. However, it appears as if the city has reached the edge, taken a deep breath and is ready to plunge. Commissioners and city leaders have long talked about the vision of the future for the town. The Imagine 2040: Plant City Comprehensive Plan holds a detailed account of what the grand vision for the next 20 years holds. After a special meeting held hours before the normal commission meeting on Dec. 9, commissioners made it clear that when it comes to the heart and soul of the city — historic downtown — they are more than ready to leap.
The special meeting was focused on a presentation from Tripp Muldrow with Community Design Solutions, the Mainstreet group consultant hired to create a “downtown vision plan” for the city in partnership with Main Street Plant City and the City of Plant City. Muldrow officially dove deep into the analysis of downtown and offered suggestions on ways the city could start making changes to ensure future economic prosperity.
“A vision without implementation is a hallucination,” Muldrow said. “We take a market snapshot and do a rapid-fire process in the community to create a plan that you all can begin working on right away if you want to create change here in downtown.”
Muldrow said the company saw a market leakage in a lack of both housing and businesses downtown. If downtown Plant City was to capture only 10 percent of what’s leaking and thus 10 percent of the potential growth over the next five years, it would be able to support things like 240 new housing units, five to six new clothing stores, five to six new specialty retail/gift/hobby stores, 10 new restaurants/bars/breweries, a meat market, a bakery, art dealers, home furnishings, a jewelry store and a pet store, according to Muldrow.
He spent several hours going over their analysis point by point to the gathered commissioners. After each section, he paused to answer any questions they had before turning to the next part of the presentation.
He touched on a several of the issues that had been discussed before, like whether there was a parking problem downtown and how the layout of the streets affects traffic, thus negatively affecting shoppers and pedestrians.
Part of Community Design Solutions’ suggestions to help combat the perception of unavailable parking, which they said was a myth outside of a handful of major events held downtown, would be to add way-finding signs, which would help people easily navigate the downtown core. Signage in general was top of their list for creative methods of sparking more engagement downtown. They also recommended people monitor the timed parking throughout the area and that there be ample signage for free or limited hour parking spots.
Aesthetics were key to many of the proposed alterations from the group. A downtown that looks appealing would draw in more visitors. It’s a simple concept, but one they spent a lot of time weaving into a variety of their pitches.
Luckily, much of what Community Design Solutions suggested is already underway in some form thanks to the planned Midtown development. The goal now is to tie in the downtown core to its new and shiny neighbor and make sure downtown is not forgotten in the addition of the upcoming district.
One thing Muldrow said set Plant City apart was the fact its city leaders have already done a lot of the work to put it in a position of success. There were things they believed need to be done to push the city further into revitalization, but he said he was shocked to see they had the commission’s support.
In fact, right after Muldrow’s presentation, City Manager Bill McDaniel set forth a six-part plan to begin the process of bringing this vision to life. He had done his homework, he knew what boxes realistically could be checked off and he suggested the city go ahead and get started. His suggestions were met with eager support from the commissioners and they unanimously agreed to get the ball rolling.
McDaniel wants to begin working on adding way-finding signs, tackling landscape design, completing a string light project along Evers Street, adding more lighting throughout McCall Park, renovating the alley on Evers Street and looking into redesigning McCall Park. It’s a process they will explore more over the next few weeks as the “hows” and “whens” fall into place.
With unanimous support from commissioners, however, it appears 2020 will be a year of rebirth in downtown and the cheering room of attendees showed the public is more than ready for it.