Splitting the Civic Center in half. A minor league baseball stadium. An aquarium. Redoing Main Street, again. A carousel plaza by the Riverfront with hot air balloons and an arcade.
All ideas from the city's three Downtown master plans over the last 32 years. All ideas that never reached fruition.
City officials unveiled the fourth Downtown master plan on Monday in front of more than 150 people packed in the hollowed-out, soon-to-be renovated old Greyhound Bus Station at Third and Sycamore streets.
This plan is different from the others, city officials said - more realistic ideas with plans in mind to keep ideas in place over the next five to seven years.
The last Downtown plan was published in 2001, and a lot has changed since then, including the addition of the high-rise offices of Old National Bank and Vectren to the Riverfront.
Now, with a $50 million expansion of the Tropicana casino, a $61 million medical school campus and a new $73 million convention hotel attached to a $120 million, five-year old arena, city officials wanted a new plan to guide development.
Brad Segal, lead developer of the plan with Denver-based PUMA, said the master plan is more than just beautification projects for a small part of Downtown.
"Downtown is the key asset to luring talent," he said. "It's really a regional economic development strategy." Mayor Lloyd Winnecke said the crowd at the master plan unveiling was evidence of a city with faith in its Downtown.
"Vibrant cities have vibrant urban cores," Winnecke said.
There are four major ideas out of the 124-page plan:
¦ An entertainment park developed at 4th and Main Street
¦ Revamping the Riverfront and altering Riverside Drive
¦ The creation of a creative "NoCo Maker's District"
¦ Public space enhancements including housing development and a new linear park.
A park now covered in fake grass is part of the key plan to reignite Main Street.
The park at Fourth and Main streets is privately owned but open to the public. It’s small, and covered in AstroTurf, but the plan calls for the city to take ownership of the land and transformit into a live music/entertainment hub.
The park could include a performance stage, or an ice rink in the winter months.
Joshua Armstrong, director of the Chamber of Commerce’s Downtown Alliance, said a top complaint of respondents during the planning stages for the plan was the lack of uses of the Riverfront.
“We needed a way to create more space,” Armstrong said. To add more space on the Riverfront walkway, the plan suggests a 20-foot walkway over Dress Plaza, as well as removing the median on Riverside Drive from Court to Walnut Street. Armstrong said that would provide more space along the Riverfront for walking and cycling, as well as other amenities, such as swings, kiosks and public art.
A proposal to add “flex lanes” to Riverside Drive is included in the plan. The two outer lanes of Riverside Drive each direction would be closed the majority of the day for parking, but would be opened during top commuting hours.
The “NoCo Maker’s District” is a cultural district that would go in an area Downtown north of Court Street — a suggestion similar to creating an “Old Town” district in roughly the same area from the 1995 Downtown master plan.
The area includes development north of the Lloyd Expressway that’s seen major redevelopment in the last year, including renovationof the old Sterling Brewery buildings and Haier America moving into the old Coca-Cola bottling plant.
As the plan states, NoCo would be “a place where people live and work, where production ranges from fabricating to knitting to brewing and beyond.” The district would be geared toward millennials.
The plan also calls for the enhancing public spaces in Downtown, with the construction of residential and commercial developments in the area between Second and Fourth streets and Sycamore and Vine streets, with a linear park running through the middle. The plan would make the old Post Office a focal point of the development.
Kelley Coures, director of the Department of Metropolitan Development, said during the master plan’s announcement at the old Greyhound Bus Station, which is located in the middle of this proposed development, that plans are in motion for development.
A Request for Proposals will be solicited soon for a 60,000 square-foot development on the city-owned lot at Second and Sycamore for the Evansville Redevelopment Commission to consider in the coming weeks, Coures said.
Other “quick-win” ideas include expanding the Riverfront-type of liquor licenses to all of Downtown. Previously, the license ended at Fourth Street. Unlike other types of licenses, there isn’t a limit to thenumber of Riverfront liquor licenses that can be issued, which city officials believe will spur more restaurant and bar development Downtown.
SEEING IT THROUGH
With myriad failed proposals from the other three masterplans, city officials wanted something that could actually work over the next five to seven years.
Evansville is a mayoral city— a new mayor comes in every four or eight years and wipes the CivicCenter slate with new department heads and visions. That’s why the plan advocates for a Downtown management organization that would steer the master plan and future development through administrations.
To help fund the alliance, the plan also calls for an “Economic Improvement District.”
That idea is to create a special district, somewhere within or all of the Downtown area, that would take an additional portion of business property taxes that would feed into its own fund.
While similar to a Tax Increment Financing district, it’s not the same. The majority of private businesses in the district would have to agree to it, and the money would be privately managed by a board of directors.
Bob Jones, CEO of Old National Bank, spoke on the plan during the master plan presentation Monday.
Jones, whose company’s request reassessment led to a drop in $900,000 from the Downtown TIF, advocated for a new economic district.
“As you think about great communities, they really are a product of strong private-public partnerships. ... City and the government cannot do it themselves. They need a strong partnership with the private sector,” Jones said.
The creation of the Economic Improvement District could take place this year, according to Segal.