Burlington Planned?

Last week, over 300 people stopped into 1 Cherry Street to visit the home base of and participate in the planBTV Charrette. Throughout the week, citizens weighed in on the changes they would like to see occur in the Queen City. The Charrette was the culminating effort to finish Phase II of planBTV – Downtown and Waterfront. The comprehensive planning project, which began last winter, strived “to identify, understand, and address current barriers to the creation of new infill development.”

According to the Seven Days, the number of people attending the closing ceremony was strong, but there seemed to be a lack of participation in other areas. For starters, there was not a single person who attended a multi-cultural breakfast and there were only 8 entries in an art contest asking people to draw their vision of the city’s future.  One Facebooker on the planBTV page also noted that there seemed to be a lack of participation from the 30 year-old’s age group. However, David White, Director of Planning and Zoning for Burlington, said that the turnout and discussions included several new faces and had an air of collaboration.

For Monday night’s closing ceremony, about 120 people attended the presentation in City Hall’s Contois Auditorium. The ceremony consisted of an announcement of the art contest winners and a presentation and discussion led by Brian Wright, a consultant from the Planning and Urban Design Collaborative, the firm that was contracted by the city, funded by a federal grant, to create a master plan for Burlington.

During the presentation, which you can watch here, Wright discussed many of the ideas that came out of the week-long planning process. Some ideas were controversial, such as getting rid of the glass awnings on Church Street, but others, like the addition of trees in attempt to beautify the sidewalks, seemed like easy aesthetic ideas to implement. Of course, a massive plan for the future wouldn’t be complete without a few far-reaching ideas as well…parking garage under City Hall Park anyone?

Going forward, Wright says his firm will formalize the plan by this spring and submit it along with zoning change recommendations to the city. At that point, it will be up to City Hall to decide whether or not to move forward with the project and/or zoning changes.

What did you think of the charrette? Weigh in on our Facebook page…