As Plant City prepares for growth with proposals for the Midtown redevelopment and a potential sports village coming with redevelopment of the Plant City Stadium and Randy L. Larson Softball Four-Plex, the Improvement League of Plant City wants no neighborhood left behind.
The Improvement League held a community meeting Thursday, May 4, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center to discuss strategies for making sure all communities develop. The meeting was led by consultant Danny McIntyre.
For the meeting, McIntyre used the Lincoln Park neighborhood, which stands between Midtown and the proposed sports complex on Park Road, as an example for steps a community must take to keep the economic development going.
“You don’t want to have a different quality of life in a different part of the city,” McIntyre, who lives in Plant City, said. “You need community leaders to engage the city about how synergy can bind Midtown development to Lincoln Park development.”
Attention, McIntyre said, follows organization. First, a community must get organized and identify its leaders. Then, those leaders must engage the community to identify what the community’s needs and goals are. It’s only after the community has a plan, McIntyre said, that those leaders and stakeholders are prepared to approach city leadership with a plan that can be implemented.
McIntyre pointed out that it will not be an easy feat, something Henry Janell, an Improvement League member, agreed with. With only a handful of attendees at the meeting, Janell said the Improvement League could take the reins of guiding the community.
“We need to give clear guidance,” Janell said.
McIntyre said guidance involves engaging every community in the city on every level. Children and parents alike must be incorporated into a community’s plan for growth, he said.
“You can’t do it in a bubble,” McIntyre said. “You have to involve other groups … diversity is about the opportunity for everybody to be successful.”
Through that engagement, McIntyre said, Plant City can become a fully incorporated city, and not disjointed, as Improvement League President William Thomas Jr. said he has seen other cities become.
“You drive out of downtown areas and everything changes,” Thomas said. “It’s like you’re in a completely different city. We don’t want that here. We want no neighborhood left behind.”
Contact Daniel Figueroa IV at dfigueroa@plantcityobserver.com.