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UTICA — The city of Utica and the Macomb County Department of Planning and Economic Development held a visioning meeting Feb. 7 at the Utica Public Library to look at potential ways to improve the city and increase the population density, which is at the top of city leaders’ priority list.
Utica received a grant from the department to have Michigan State University urban planning students create a “revisioning” of downtown Utica.
They invited members of the public to participate and share their ideas to improve the city.
Utica elected officials seek to improve the city in a variety of ways. They hope to attract people by creating a lively walkable downtown district with plenty of amenities. The focus will be on Auburn Road, prioritizing adding ways to enhance the sidewalks by making them safer via a complete streets approach. Complete streets is a design philosophy that seeks to make streets safe for use not just by motor vehicles, but also by bicycles and pedestrians.
Creating buffers and clear signage could be one way that officials choose in an attempt to increase pedestrian safety.
City leaders also said that they hope to help close the gap between the downtown area and Jimmy John’s Field.
For the visioning meeting, some questions that were provided to the public were:
• What do you like about the current downtown?
• What do you not like about the current downtown?
• What would you like to see in the downtown 10 years in the future?
• How would you like to see connectivity between downtown and Jimmy John’s Field?
Many ideas were shared and will be used to create a plan for the downtown in the future, such as the possibility of a welcome sign for Utica from M-59 and more parking.
Utica Mayor Gus Calandrino said there was a great turnout for the planning event and the city received a lot of new, good ideas.
“I’d like to thank the Macomb County Planning and Economic Development team for helping us with this important project to find ways improve Utica’s downtown. The turnout was excellent. We had a great mix of interested residents and business owners present, all sharing their thoughts about how to enhance the downtown area and make it more attractive to visitors and investors,” he said.
He said the team from Michigan State University will take all the data it gathered at the meeting and write a report.
“This report will be a valuable tool as we make decisions about the direction we head with future development. We expect to receive the report in April and will be sharing with our residents,” Calandrino said.
Noah Jones, graduate research assistant at the Michigan State University School of Planning, Design and Construction, said that the meeting went well.
“We had a great turnout and more people showed up than we were expecting, which was fantastic. We haven’t gone through the responses from everyone yet, as we are waiting for the digital survey responses to all come in as well, but the general consensus is that everyone seemed very excited about this project. The rest of my group and I are very excited to start going through all of the responses and to start thinking of recommendations to provide,” he said.
