KALAMAZOO, MI -- Mayor Bobby Hopewell wants you to think big.
Wednesday night, more than 100 people filled the Rose Street Market building for the second day of an Imagine Kalamazoo 2025 workshop. Maps and design concepts covered the first floor, displayed as visual representations of residents' ideas from a Tuesday meeting focused on improving downtown Kalamazoo.
Hopewell capped off the evening with an appeal to the assembled citizens, business owners, developers, municipal planners, elected officials and city staff: Dream of a better city, then make it a reality.
"If we're going to be a place where people want to come and live, where our children enjoy the opportunities of our city...we should be striving for everyone to find their path," Hopewell said. "This has been a process that has tried hard to get everyone's input to create a strategic vision for us. There will still be more work to do."
Approval of the master plan and strategic vision is expected sometime in June. The Planning Commission will review the plan on June 1, followed by the City Commission on June 19.
For more than a year, city staff engaged 3,200 residents electronically, in small group settings and in one-on-one conversations. After focusing on individual neighborhoods and various sections of downtown, the Imagine Kalamazoo 2025 process is compiling feedback to draft into one cohesive plan.
It started as broadly and became more focused over time. The resulting document will serve as a guide for all goals, policies and procedures created by the city for the next eight years.
Hopewell said he believes commissioners will support the plan, partially because of the vast outreach effort. While the 2010 master plan process only garnered feedback from 500 community members, Kalamazoo stepped up its game in reaching out this time around.
"We've gotten so much more feedback than we've received in any of our planning processes before, from more diverse groups than ever before," Hopewell said.
Previous master plans can sometimes sit on the proverbial shelf after being created. Not this time, said Community Planning and Development Director Rebekah Kik. She and her predecessor, now Assistant City Manager Laura Lam, wanted to "blow up" the old way of doing things.
What resulted was a grassroots, door-to-door effort, supplemented with online tools.
"Rebekah is so active everywhere," Hopewell said. "We haven't had a process before to my knowledge with meetings in (residents') living rooms."
Results of Tuesday's downtown-focused workshop revealed similar themes to the desires of residents in neighborhood meetings.
Emphasis was placed on increasing the connectivity of city streets, improving access for non-motorized transport, increasing youth development opportunities and redeveloping underutilized land.
Volunteer designers and architecture students from Andrews University in Berrien Springs took the feedback and created mock drafts. Some were tasked with a specific quadrant of downtown Kalamazoo, while others focused on things like businesses and walkability.
People look at designs for the future of downtown Kalamazoo on April 12, 2017 at the Rose Street Market. The maps and other visual representations were designed at a workshop and are now being shown off to the community. (Carly Geraci | Mlive.com)
Hayward Babineaux, an intern architect at Byce & Associates, dealt with how to connect Bronson Park with a proposed Kalamazoo County courthouse several blocks north by the river walk.
Pedestrians are scarce on Church Street due to heavy traffic on West Michigan Avenue and few streetscape features. Residents were further deterred to pass by a darkened overpass at West Water Street, particularly women and people with children.
The solution? Narrow Church Street with wider sidewalks to slow traffic, add things like benches and bike racks, and commission murals facing the park to signify its central role in the downtown.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Kalamazoo Area Transportation Study found the most dangerous areas for pedestrians and bicyclists is the major arterial streets that emanate from downtown Kalamazoo.
Traffic calming techniques like narrowing roads and converting one-way streets to accommodate travel in both directions were highly requested by residents.
The core of Hopewell's speech Wednesday night is to think differently. He highlighted several parking lots and blighted buildings as places ripe with opportunity.
The city is exploring ways to create a transparent dashboard to track the progress of the master plan goals. Hopewell said it will serve as a way to keep the city accountable to residents who made their voices heard.
Kalamazoo staff plan to continue listening. City Manager Jim Ritsema said the document will not stay static.
"There's so much potential and opportunity for us," he said. "It's capturing that enthusiasm and using that to do something, which we now have the ability to do."
The attitude of creating community relationships may have been what caught the eye of philanthropists William Parfet and William Johnston, Kik said.
Imagine Kalamazoo 2025 was given its center role in what city staff have called "Disk of Destiny" because it is the starting point of an organizational plan to find projects funded through the Kalamazoo Foundation for Excellence.
In each of the next three years, $10 million in donations will be used for aspirational, community-building projects mostly centered around addressing the cycle of poverty and uplifting youth in Kalamazoo.
It will be a long process, as the City Commissioners are quick to bring up after long work sessions this year.
"If you thought I would tell you 'this is what we are going to do,' we are not at that stage," Hopewell said. "We have great ideas. You have imagined what can be and we have the opportunity to move forward."