Did you miss your opportunity to hear about the uptown streetscape project?
JEO and the City of Mount Vernon hosted a kick-off meeting on the project at Mount Vernon City Hall Tuesday, Feb. 27. More than 40 property and business owners in the four block radius of Mount Vernon had discussions about the current streetscape, items they like about the street now, what the scope of this project will be and the next steps.
The streetscape project could be a huge undertaking, addressing the four blocks of Mount Vernon’s uptown, looking at the infrastructure that may need to be placed, as well as potentially sidewalks, design elements and how the streets and sidewalks will work.
While the hope is not to impact the look of the business frontages in uptown, depending on the scope of the project, there may be impacts to businesses if they have lead water service lines. Those will have to be replaced moving forward.
Tuesday’s discussion also broached a couple of potential ideas on ways to improve safety in the uptown and make sure parking resources were more well known to citizens and visitors to the community.
As citizens, one of the steps that is open and available to all is to take part in the project survey available at https://bit.ly/4brsgom or at the city’s website. That survey is open now through the end of March.
This project is being led by a project advisory team of several business leaders who are discussing the project as it moves forward.
The next public meetings will happen in April, when attendees will have the ability to participate in a design charette or give guidance for ideas they’d like to see implemented in a streetscape project.
Just having a streetscape study doesn’t mean everything will be implemented at once. When Mount Vernon completed their last streetscape study, it took more than eight years for the alley improvements to the south alley and Hilltop Pocket Park to be completed as funding was available. That will be similar with this project, and city administrator Chris Nosbisch noted that if a project was too costly for many uptown businesses, the city will look at tabling action or tackling a slimmer version of the project moving forward. The importance is addressing the infrastructure needs in the roadway, yes, but there are options on how that can be tackled.
Grants may also be available for the projects, as Hwy. 1 and First Street are some of the only farm to market roads in Mount Vernon, meaning they have additional grants available for improvements to be completed on those streets.
If you have questions on the project, assistant city administrator Lori Boren is serving as the contact person for this project.