c O L U M B U S June 18,2006
Ledger-Enquirer
Editorial
Site will define center of city
Unless one has better than average imagination, or is a particularly experienced and visionary landscape planner, it’s hard for most of us to get a sense from even the most detailed artist’s renderings what the finished reality of any site plan will really look like to real human beings at ground level.
In the case of the Columbus Library right now, you don’t have to imagine; you just have to look. It’s a gorgeous new facility in the middle of a mostly dismal plain of asphalt, unshaded ground and a few hopeful but lonely-looking seedlings.
And if you’ve been around long enough, you don’t have to imagine what the area can look like if it’s designed badly. You just have to remember the Macon Road that became synonymous with curb-cut development and portable signs with bulbs missing.
That can’t be where a community that has invested considerable money in a new library and considerable hope and vision in a new initiative called MidTown, wants to see its main east-west corridor, and its future, lead.
Over the past week, MidTown Inc., at the urging of the Muscogee County School District, has been conducting a series of public forums and asking the library site’s stakeholders - which is to say all of us - to offer opinions on three basic site concepts, and to suggest improvements, alterations and compromises among them. The turnout has been pretty good, the degree of interest and thoughtfulness around the issue excellent.
The three basic site options - which MidTown Executive Director Teresa Tomlinson emphasizes are not mutually exclusive and not the only possibilities - are probably familiar to most readers; for reference, they are reproduced in the Local section of today’s paper.
Simply put, they are:
· A “park” ( greenspace ) option;
· A high-quality development plan; and
· A medium-density development plan.
The latter two project mixed-use private residential, retail and office development; all three plans includes a new school district administrative building and a city services building.
Few forum participants seemed to think the all-greenspace option is affordable, practical or practicable; most insisted that greenspace and tree canopy are essential. On both points, we agree: This needs to be a part of town that both pays for itself and contributes to the esthetic and environmental quality of life. The success or failure of this site could be the tipping point fro the whole MidTown vision, and much of the hope for Columbus South as well.
A conviction on which this board is unanimous: The worst thing for the library site and the whole of MidTown area would be to do nothing; the second worst would be to develop it haphazardly, rather than with clearly articulated and adhered-to standards set by the people who call this community their own.
- Dusty Nix, for the editorial board