Much of the property has been acquired and buildings stand vacant and ready for demolition. With the acquisition of one last parcel nearly complete, it's time to move ahead on the Augusta Common project.
The Augusta Common is a visionary concept, the heart and soul of the downtown master plan. It's part of a larger vision for downtown revitalization, however.
It came about thanks to Augusta Tomorrow, a business leadership group, which contracted with a planning firm to study and present an update of the 1995 downtown master plan.
In addition to the Augusta Common, it includes plans for:
Revitalizing other parts of the city center with additional enhancements.
Creating a biomedical/biotechnology research park near the Laney-Walker area.
Siting the new judicial center at Greene Street.
Creating more residential and business diversity.
Some of the 1995 plan has already been accomplished or is in the process of being implemented, but plenty of opportunity still exists. Now, it's time to get the plan's centerpiece in place.
The master plan says, ``The heart of the City Center will be the new Common, which will serve as the central gathering place for citizens...It is important to leverage the presence of the Common with uses that generate a constant flow of users and visitors.''
It might be dangerous to proceed with the project if there was only money for demolition of the strip between Broad and Reynolds streets, and if no money was left for construction.
But city has $2 million earmarked for the Common project, and it can't cost that much to simply demolish vacant buildings. In fact, most everything except public restrooms can be done with the existing money.
Another $1.2 million is expected from the Augusta Neighborhood Improvement Corp. to complete the plan, money that actually could have been available now if the city had not dropped the ball and neglected to put a proposal in for the current round of funding that ANIC had available.
The Augusta Common proposal for the ANIC money will surely get favorable consideration from the ANIC board in the 2001 process, but with no proposal to consider, ANIC's board simply awarded the money it had to other economic development and neighborhood revitalization projects.
In the meantime, bring on the bulldozers. Let's not let 2001 go by without visible progress.
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