2016.03.02 EDC Packet Combined - Laserfiche WebLink

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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. 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 is attached 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. 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. Staff Recommendation 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 (see list bulleted above) 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. Attachments Ehlers Slide Presentation 2005 NWQ Framework Plan & Design Guidelines