Arbor Update

Ann Arbor Area Community News

Upcoming City Events

24. July 2007 • Juliew
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Unfortunately, although these events do appear on the City web site, they are not currently showing the details of any of these events.

  • Municipal Center Public Meeting July 24, 7:00pm: Master Plan Introduced for Site Downtown Library Multi-purpose room (lower level) – This meeting is intended to provide the public with an early opportunity to comment on the building layouts being considered for the west side of the Municipal Center. (Thanks to Ron Suarez for this information).


  1. The link is now live for the Municipal Center Public Meeting. I find it interesting that this flyer didn’t even go out to the usual suspects. If this is really a public meeting, someone needs to let the public know about it! Although now that it is going to be on the current City Hall site, I’m not sure people care as much as if it was going to be on any other site. It will be interesting to see how they are going to fit everything in though because the plan is to “offer community members a convenient, accessible location for city services and a year-round vibrant civic place in the heart of the town. The first phase of the project includes a public safety building for the 15th District Court and Ann Arbor Police Department.” Hopefully the plans being shown tonight will be available somewhere for people who can not attend (especially with the short notice). There will be another meeting September 12 so add that to your calendars now.


       —Juliew    Jul. 24 '07 - 06:09PM    #
  2. I received a notice for this meeting a couple weeks ago. It went out to all the architects/designers/planners in the area. I think that should be public enough.


       —Robert Moses    Jul. 24 '07 - 08:44PM    #
  3. It went out to all the architects/designers/planners in the area. I think that should be public enough.

    Um, yeah, and that statement would be pretty much the problem here. If you are going to “offer community members a convenient, accessible location for city services and a year-round vibrant civic place in the heart of the town,” you might want to ask those community members what they think is convenient, accessible, and vibrant and not what an area architect/designer/planner thinks it should be. Having all the groups work together, especially at the visioning stages, is what makes the best plan. This is exactly when there should be public commentary, not three years into the project when a building has been designed that won’t work for the community.


       —Juliew    Jul. 24 '07 - 10:26PM    #
  4. Ah, yes…“community” members. I suppose they might have something to rant on about. By all means. Let them have their say.


       —Robert Moses    Jul. 25 '07 - 12:19AM    #
  5. The Urban Design Workshop last night was a much better experience than the first one. The consultants really listened to the criticisms from the first session and fixed the problems so that was great. There were fewer than 50 people there and although many came in with agendas, for the most part, the groups were able to come up with interesting responses and proposals. I was in a very good group of people who worked well together. I know that was not the case with everyone (KGS, how did you feel about it?).

    Also interesting were the frank comments on the new City Hall proposal and the Library proposal which I will post on the Library thread.


       —Juliew    Jul. 27 '07 - 07:47PM    #
  6. I wasn’t at the first seminar the consultants did, but this one appeared pretty successful. While there was still too much information for our team to get through in the alloted time, I feel we made good progress on providing feedback for their structure of ideas. I liked the character districts they created and the basic massing and frontage maps. That said, our team did not gel very well because we had 3 people of the ‘No Change in AA Ever’ party, 1 who was quiet for the whole thing, and 3 people who could see growth in certain areas (State, Main, Liberty, Washington, Huron). I found it a bit frustrating because some areas I was willing to compromise, but the 3 ‘No Growth’ folks did not want to compromise one bit. Glad to hear other teams came together better than that.


       —KGS    Jul. 27 '07 - 08:44PM    #