By Dan Miner/minerd@gnnewspaper.com
Consultants and officials from virtually every level of government converged Tuesday to explain the $400,000 federal grant they say will revive the struggling neighborhood surrounding Highland Avenue.
“The process is remarkable,” said Mark Reid, a consultant with Urban Strategies Inc., the Toronto-based firm hired by the City of Niagara Falls to work on the project. “It’s about brownfield transformation.”
About 45 people gathered at the Doris W. Jones Family Resource Center on Ninth Street to hear the presentation. The city received word they were accepted into the state’s Brownfield Opportunity Area program in Fall 2004, but the funds finally became available in Summer 2007.
The meeting was the first of five open houses that will be held in the process, which will take 18 months and turn community input and a series of environmental, land-use and marketing studies into a master plan. They hope businesses use the plan to turn the area’s vast expanses of brownfields into green businesses that will employ local residents.
“It’s extremely important, not only for the Highland area but for the City of Niagara Falls,” said James Pitts, the CEO of J.W. PItts Planning and Development LLC, another consultant working on the project and also the meeting’s moderator.
A series of speakers went through the program, including the importance of community involvement and examples of other cities which have been successful in redeveloping their brownfields.
But after the presentation, questions were raised about the effectiveness of the program. Highland Avenue resident Ken Hamilton pointed out that several such studies have been done in the past, to little gain.
In a series of exchanges with Pitts and Henry Taylor, who is the director of the Center for Urban Studies at the University at Buffalo and is involved with the program, Hamilton detailed his issues with such studies, especially that the businesses they do attract don’t hire those who live in the neighborhood.
Of all the people present at Tuesday’s meeting, only two actually live in the Highland community, Hamilton said.
Taylor responded that this project is different in that it will be driven by the community, and therefore serve its best interests if it’s put in place.
“You can do something about it, or you can complain forever,” he said.
