10-30-13 Common Council Meeting Minutes

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SPECIAL MEETING OCTOBER 30, 2013 was before this Administration. I certainly can understand the frustration because nobody can look at either of those corridors and say that our work is done or say that we are where we need to be. And so I would regard this as something with a great deal of urgency. And work should begin right away perhaps we are in a position to do work even before next year. And to continue to make sure that their voices are heard. I will turn it over to Community Investment Director Scott Ford. th Scott Ford, Executive Director, Community Investment, 14 Floor County-City Building, South Bend, Indiana: I just wanted to follow up with the Mayor’s comments with regard to the corridor program. As it has been presented to Councilmember’s we reached and RFP in July and received 20 responses from 22 teams of national and local teams. We are down to our final 3 st and look forward to awarding that contract in November and anticipate the 1 public meeting will be in January. It will be a six (6) months process and it is very much oriented toward delivering a series of actionable items for the corridors specifically that would involve a lot neighborhood engagement in this process. Looking at it through a fact phased business plan you are looking at what the market is and also forming that and using that to help to deliver a series of recommendations that may include things like business assistant and or land use regulation changes like infrastructure improvements to start having an immediate impact. That’s one reason why we have asked for funding amount including so that we can act on that with the completion of the plan. Councilmember Henry Davis Jr.: Thank you for responding to my request to put more funds in there for the corridor program. Thank you for doing that, and I’m finished. Councilmember Schey: I defer. Councilmember Dr. Fred Ferlic: Thank you Karen, First of all I want to publicly thank Karen and Mark Neal, this budget process is very painful. I want to thank Dr. Varner also, and I was also going to acknowledge him and Kathy and John, they made it come to life, in fact, I know more about the city budget than my own budget, so thank you. But I would like to ask Scott, on the two way streets, why is your chronology important? You phased these out for the Council explain why the chronology is important? Scott Ford: I appreciate speaking to that. So, you know originally for nearly 100 years, the streets in downtown South Bend were a two-way network. When they switched to the one-way, the principle went from destination to evacuation. And the mode shift was to evacuate people through town at a high speed. So looking at a way how we can reconstruct the road network and again go back to downtown being a destination. We need to look at two points of confluence and there is one at the north at Michigan right where it crosses the river. If you look at the peak traffic there you need to distribute the traffic among four streets rather than two. So rather than just being on Main and St. Joe, you distribute along Lafayette, Main, Michigan and St. Joe. So in order to get the south bound traffic if you can think of this an unfortunately I don’t have a map to point to, but you need to get some of the traffic to divert on Bartlett and then down Lafayette, so that helps release some of the pressure on Main and St. Joe. So as you look at sequencing, you look at being able to restore the last few blocks of Lafayette and Williams back to two way traffic and then we go to at the same time concurrently you complete the due diligence process on Main and St. Joe so that in our negotiations with INDOT we are able to have an informed conversation we’re able to get there as soon as possible. So that’s in terms of the sequencing of Lafayette & Williams then Main & St. Joe. Councilmember Dr. David Varner: No, I’m pretty much all questioned out after eighteen sessions. Councilmember Oliver Davis: A couple of things. I’m back to Scott Ford. Often times when a business has come into town the focus is getting the business first and then dealing with the