Jonathan Streetman/The Herald: The eight projects that the City of Huntingburg hopes to address were displayed on poster boards during a meeting Tuesday evening at the Huntingburg Event Center to discuss with community members the initiatives on which the Stellar Communities bid are based.
HUNTINGBURG — Dubois County’s two cities hope the state recognizes their efforts to improve their communities as stellar.
Today, both Huntingburg and Jasper are submitting letters of interest in hopes of being named a Stellar Community.
Huntingburg Mayor Denny Spinner and the consultants the city has hired to help the process gathered Tuesday evening at the Huntingburg Event Center to discuss with community members the initiatives on which the Stellar Communities bid are based. The eight projects were displayed on poster boards throughout the room and labeled with goals and feasibility of implementation.
The Stellar Communities program is a multi-agency partnership started in 2010 designed to fund comprehensive three-year community development projects in Indiana’s smaller communities. The Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority, Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs and Indiana Department of Transportation participate in this program.
“I believe we’ve positioned ourselves very well to show that we’ve listened to our community’s needs and have put together an application and plan that will reflect that,” said Spinner, who mentioned many of the initiatives presented are products of the “Reviving the Pride” listening sessions and feedback from the downtown revitalization plan announced last month.
A designation as a Stellar Community provides an economic windfall from the state that allows winning cities to fast-track projects. In Huntingburg, projects on the comprehensive plan include affordable family housing, murals on grain silos to create a community gateway, improvements to the Fourth Street waterline, senior housing redevelopment at the former St. Joseph Hospital, a downtown park at Fourth and Market streets, improvements to Ninth Street, a new municipal maintenance and shelter building and the creation of the Heritage Trail, a paved walking trail that would connect the city.
“The Heritage Trail creates a loop that provides that connectivity to all of the projects we’re presenting,” Spinner said. “That’s very important to us.”
The city has hired consultants Ed Curtin, owner of CWC Latitudes of Columbus, and Ron Taylor and Scott Siefker, partners at Taylor Siefker Williams Design Group of Indianapolis, to help complete the submission process. Curtin worked last year with officials in Bedford, which was awarded the Stellar Communities designation.
“The community had already done so much preparation before we started this process, the next step now is implementation,” Curtin said. “I really like what we’ve been able to put together and I think our application will be very competitive.”
All 11 projects Jasper is including in its letter are improvements detailed in the city’s master plan for its downtown and riverfront areas. They are: extending Second Street to link Third and Main Street; extending Mill Street to connect to Patoka River and making the extension a pedestrian walkway; adding a walking and biking path on the north side of the river; creating a terrace, called Patoka Steps, to the south side of the river; adding a second pedestrian bridge across the river; making improvements to the railroad track between Jasper and French Lick, which is used by the Spirit of Jasper; improving the Square’s landscape with buffers, re-striped parking, outdoor seating and interactive public art; enhancing Main Street from the Square to the river; renovating the former Astra Theater into a cinema and restaurant or café; repurposing historic property for housing and senior apartments and creating a downtown facade-improvement program.
The downtown and riverfront master plan was crafted last year by CityVisions Associates of Louisville and Gamble Associates of Boston. The firms were hired in January to help the city with its Stellar Communities letter of intent. Mayor Terry Seitz has said the city will pursue these projects, even if Jasper is not selected in the program.
The Stellar Community process is highly competitive. Since 2010, more than 60 communities have applied. Only two are selected each year. In 2013, Bedford and Richmond were named as the recipients, each submitting almost $20 million in projects.
Applications will be reviewed by the program’s coordinators who will, within about a month, pull from that list a group of six to eight finalists. The communities that make the cut must then submit a full application and invite officials to tour their city and see first-hand how their three-year revitalization plan would take effect.
Siefker, whose firm helped Whitestown northwest of Indianapolis become a finalist in 2012, believes Huntingburg has an application worthy of advancing to the second phase.
“We all feel very positive about the plan,” he said. “Since there was already a new comprehensive plan and a revitalization plan, there was no scrambling to come up with projects. Really it was picking and choosing which projects could be implemented immediately and compliment one another.”
Herald Staff Writer Candy Neal contributed to this report.
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