Category: NC APA

Readers, this ball is in your court

Readers, engage! Two PlanCharlotte.org articles last week deserve wider play.

Honor the places you love

One is a way for everyone, not just planners, to honor the places they love in North Carolina.  Once again, the N.C. chapter of the American Planning Association (APA-NC) is sponsoring a Great Places in North Carolina contest. Find more information here.

APA members can nominate places in a variety of categories, such as Great Places in the Making (downtown Gastonia won that one recently). Non-APA members this year can nominate a spot for the Great Public Place award, or the Great Main Street award. Then online voting taps the Peoples Choice Award for each of those categories.

As it happens, I’ve been asked to be on the panel of judges – as a non-planner – so please, give me a great group of nominations from which to choose. And don’t forget, a street is part of the public realm and so it should qualify for Great Public Place. Queens Road West, anyone? Or Camden Road, outside of Price’s Chicken Coop? 

Consider different growth scenarios

The second way for readers in the Charlotte region to get involved is a series of workshops scheduled for March by the CONNECT Our Future initiative, a 14-county, three-year planning effort being led by the Centralina Council of Governments. Read more about it here.

The workshops begin March 6 (Thursday) in Statesville. Charlotte’s is March 7 (Friday) at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church.  It’s north of I-85, on Beatties Ford Road. (As you head that way, consider whether Beatties Ford Road has any spots eligible for Great Public Place. What about Five Points?)

Participants will hear about four different scenarios of the region’s future, and the possible social, economic and environmental effects of each scenario. The four are: 1) continued suburban-form growth, 2) following current plans, 3) development of city centers and downtowns, and 4) regional transportation options.

When planners gather …

WILMINGTON – As soon as I get my sandwich at Pender’s Cafe on Front Street I’ll be heading to the large new-ish Wilmington Convention Center for a session on greenway planning at the annual convention of the N.C. Chapter of the American Planning Association. I’ll be here until mid-day Thursday, blogging from some of the sessions. So check back in during the next two days.

For now, must chow down and then rush back to the center.

Greenways: Lessons from other cities (2:35 p.m.):

I’m now listening to planners from Wilmington describe their city’s cross city trail – which will be 15 miles when complete, from downtown Wilmington east to Wrightsville Beach.  It’s the only greenway in the city now, although a greenway plan is under way now to plan for more.

Wilmington greenway planners traveled to Greenville, S.C., to study that city’s Swamp Rabbit trail, which when complete will run 17.5 miles from Greenville to Travellers Rest. Now it’s about 13.5 miles. They found community advocacy was key in making that greenway happen. A regional advocacy group, Upstate Forever, pushed for trail acquisition and helped provide volunteers for cleaning up the abandoned rail bed the trail runs on.

The Swamp Rabbit Trail is sponsored in part by the Greenville Hospital, which dedicated $100,000 a year for 10 years, considering it a way to improve community health.

Some of the trail’s innovative marketing ideas: Organizers now sell coordinates along the trail. If something special happened on the trail, you can buy a sponsorship for that spot. And when trail officials realized that restrooms and parking along the trail were sometimes hard to find, they partnered with businesses and institutions and now the interactive trail maps show where you can use a restroom or find a parking place.

Another tidbit: In North Carolina, a state law protects property owners along greenway trails from liability.