2016.06.01 EDC Packet Combined- With Additional Handout

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Redevelopment, the Commission moved on to BR&E and spent much of 2015 formulating a BR&E program/policy, which were presented to, and affirmed by the Council in January of 2016 by adoption of Resolution 2016-011. Gundlach stated last month, based upon direction from the Council, the EDC revised the Council's Economic Development Strategic Priority to be defined based upon these four categories. Since the areas of Physical Redevelopment and BR&E have been defined, and previous Councils have done some work on the Housing Programs item (work that has not yet been presented to the EDC), the chair has directed staff to focus on the Sense of Place topic. As such, the memo and attachments provided aim to introduce this topic to the EDC to fully spur discussion and ideas on how the commission could advance recommendations and/or policies to the Council for consideration, as it pertains to creating a Sense of Place as a part of the City's overall Economic Development program. Gundlach commented in February of 2015, when these topics were originally introduced to the commission, staff provided a slide show presentation prepared by Ehlers. These slides present the Sense of Place topic, include background and definitions, and advance to actual examples and photos of what communities have done. To summarize, creating a sense of place is creating recreation, retail, office, and housing environments with an experience or lifestyle. This includes: • Ensuring transportation connections, whether by automobile, mass transit, walking, and/or biking. • Creating high quality public spaces, including parks, plazas, street medians and boulevards, street corners and sidewalks • Supporting activity at the street level, including restaurants (or farmers markets) & entertainment • Supporting public art • Incorporating ongoing/future rebranding efforts to City monumentation at gateways and signage. Gundlach stated many of these concepts are not new to New Brighton. In fact, in 2005 there was a planning effort associated with New Brighton Exchange where design guidelines were established to address many of these same concepts. The approved document in that effort was provided to the Commission for additional reference and there are several pages that talk about "placemaking principals". The Commission may want to consider using concepts already approved by Council (in 2005) for New Brighton Exchange and amending/revising them to better align with the community as a whole. Gundlach indicated the challenge is how to implement these qualities. It's important to remember the struggle is almost always financial as there is a constant strain on resources, whether at the City level with a public improvement project or at the developer level who is balancing development costs against creating amenity -rich projects. This isn't to say sense of place amenities should be overlooked, but it's important to understand they often get implemented incrementally and not all at once. Gundlach commented staff suspects it may be appropriate to work towards drafting policy statements or recommendations for the Council to consider. These policy statements and/or recommendations likely will trickle down to other commissions, possibly the Planning Commission, Parks, Recreation, and Environmental Commission, and Public Safety Commission. To begin this process, staff recommends the Commission focus on: • Discussing the Sense of Place topic generally and find a consensus of what types of amenities are important in contributing to the economic wellbeing of the community. • Provide direction to staff on additional areas of interest and study that may be helpful in advancing this topic to the City Council