An update on the downtown development plan was presented to city council at Monday's city council meeting.

 The development plan is a multi-stage process to determine what needs to be done to make changes to the downtown core. 

The first preliminary round took place last year during the Airdrie lets connect downtown visioning exercise. The exercise was meant to determine the public's overall feeling of the current downtown core and look at what changes would need to be made to the downtown to create a hub for residents. After the results were in, city council directed staff to create a new plan to help revitalize the downtown.

During a survey, it was determined that residents of Airdrie rated the downtown core a 4.5/10.

"The feedback we reviewed from the public on downtown was quite negative, there was an extensive list of weaknesses in the downtown core mostly around the idea of there being no draw to the core." 

The first round of public engagement is going to look deeper into the more physiological aspects of the planning process to determine what the core values of the community are and what challenges do landowners and businesses deal with right now. Round one will be a survey to determine what the downtown needs and what opportunities the city has to meet those needs. 

"We know that the public wants the downtown to have an identity and we know they want it to be a more vibrant exciting downtown."

For round two the city will be developing several concept plans for downtown while involving the community, stakeholders, municipal stakeholders and landowners. The city will then create three or four concept plans.

In round three the city will present these plans back to the public and stakeholders and ask for feedback as to determine what the community and stakeholders like and dislike about each plan and what plan they prefer as well as any major concerns they would have. Once that is done the city will consolidate the three plans extracting the best elements out of all of them before using them to create a draft plan. 

In round four the city will present the draft plan to the public for general feedback and more specifically stakeholders and the business community to determine what the city has to do to make the plan viable and attract business into the downtown core.  Once all of those rounds have taken place the city will refine the plan and present it to city council and the stakeholders and businesses with explanations as to why each individual decision was made. 

 

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