The difference between the Greater Downtown Area Plan and the city’s history with Downtown planning recommendations, Tom Coyle believes, is the difference between dirt and dust: One is turned by action; the other is gathered by inaction.
That’s why Coyle, planning director for Kansas City, Mo., is genuinely excited about the potential that the area plan approved by the city in 2010 will produce tangible results that can help transform not just the central business district, but the broader Downtown area.
The 119-page document hasn’t received much attention locally, but it’s piquing the interest of city planners around the country for the game-changing component it brings to the planning process: This one doesn’t stop at merely articulating a vision.
“We built an administrative structure around successful implementation,” Coyle said. “That has never been done before here. What we hear time and time again is that we have yet another plan, and it will end up on another bookshelf. With this, we redefined the implementation process.”
Driven by a steering committee of 30 influential civic and neighborhood leaders, the yearlong series of meetings, studies and interviews produced the plan’s broad brushstrokes. But those involved didn’t stop there; they also laid out, over a period of eight years or more, a timetable for specific project work to achieve that vision.
As a result, Coyle said, the city is already redirecting limited resources to achieve some of the plan’s goals. City Manager Troy Schulte, an early backer of the committee before he assumed his current office, has provided continuing support, Coyle noted. And he made Coyle the point person on an implementation committee that has been working with other department heads at City Hall to identify plan recommendations that can be factored into ongoing operations.
So, without brass bands, confetti or blaring headlines, work has already begun on some of the 75 projects that constitute the strategy for moving Downtown forward. “We’re flying under the radar a bit,” Coyle says, “but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
By embracing the current Downtown plan, the city repealed or amended more than a dozen smaller-scale neighborhood plans. It now has a comprehensive, unified vision for the area from state line to the North KC limits, Woodland on the east and 31st Street on the south. Although it has hundreds of components to it, the plan is organized to achieve five primary goals:
Doubling the Downtown population. This is seen as a linchpin to success of broader goals in the plan. The number of Downtown residents presently stands at about 17,000; hitting this target would represent nearly 2 percent of the metropolitan area’s 2 million residents.
Increasing employment. This is the cart following the population horse. Without the residents, the area would lack the kind of employee pool needed to attract and retain businesses.
Creating a “walkable Downtown.” Again, the density provided by more residents would require access to the services and amenities they support.
Promoting safe neighborhoods. More people on the streets is seen as a deterrent to crime and powerful means of changing perceptions that the urban core is unsafe. Key drivers would be improving the cleanliness and level of maintenance in Downtown neighborhoods.
Promoting sustainability. The plan says that with more people closer to jobs, the region would realize reduced commuting times and a newfound support for alternative modes of transportation.
“The goal,” Coyle said, “is to start to work a plan here. We’re good at developing plans, but when we get out in the field, we kind of stand around and the politics of distribution of limited resources resolves the question of who gets what. We’re trying to introduce a long-range plan with a lot of stakeholders, not just city staff folks, but people in the community, neighborhood activists and business interests.”
Working that plan means a structured approach to implementing projects. For example, the lineup of 30 projects in a front-loaded Year One calls for such efforts as crafting the transit-oriented development corridor policy, an effort already in the works, evaluating the development potential for Washington Square across from Union Station, or starting construction of the Front Street extension to connect the Kit Bond bridge with the Grand Avenue viaduct.
It’s the kind of in-depth planning that has drawn criticism from the likes of Carl Schramm, CEO at the Kauffman Foundation, who routinely argues that long-term sustainable growth can’t be either micro- or macro-managed from City Hall, but must be more organic in nature.
Coyle, though, believes that past patterns of development are giving way to a new reality, one that will rely more heavily on public processes to kick-start improvements.
“This is not a Kansas City-specific issue,” he says. “The adage that the history of plans written and never implemented is one that’s everywhere. It’s more critical in 2011 because historically, we expected the private sector to support these kinds of visions through new development and we have to look at that differently now.
“We have to look at combinations of public/private investment. In the past, a lot of it was implemented simply because it was new development, and planning offices would require certain conditions for private-sector investment, but that just doesn’t work any more.”
Why? Because the economy we’re in, and the tight spots that municipalities are in, have been game-changers, Coyle says.
“In 2011, our economic environment is what it is, but we’re not going to be here forever,” he says. “We’re laying the groundwork for an administrative infrastructure to see that good decisions can be made when funding does become available, and that’s as important as the capital projects themselves.” 