There are very specific reasons why master plans for downtown Westport don’t get to the implementation stage decade after decade!
But first we need to lay a little groundwork.
“We exist in a world of extraordinary abstraction. We have lost a sense of the real,” to quote Rory Stewart.
“We are suffering from a tyranny of big ideas. We need to rediscover how to think small,” to quote Evgeny Morozov.
The mantra from the current administration about downtown is thus: “The new downtown plan is best looked at as a whole.”
The outside planners, the RBA group, have done a terrible job, I think, because with all their planning expertise and theories about traffic they have failed to understand that downtown is an actual living and breathing place already. They have only seen it as a place for them to transform, in some way, in any way. Their big idea is to make it harder to drive around!!
Transformation for transformations sake:
Let’s look at the DSC, the Downtown Steering Committee. They have been charged to come up with a downtown plan. And by God they will come up with one. But why? What is the need for a transformed downtown?
Parking is the only issue. However, the RBA group wants to make downtown more walkable. Can you imagine someone walking a mile to downtown and then spending $10,000 dollars on a diamond ring at Tiffany’s? Or walking across newly installed lawns in Parker Harding or Jesup Green just to see the river – in February? With a foot of snow on the ground?
This new plan is the most absurd thing I have ever heard of.
I’m sure everybody involved has the greatest of intentions but it is the function of these institutions (the politicians, committee members and outside planning group) that removes their thinking from the actual reality on the ground.
It is the committee that is the problem, not the individuals, they are only doing their best. The idea of a committee that will redesign downtown is where the problem lay.
What about flooding? That was supposed to be a big reason why we need a downtown plan. But the new plan doesn’t address flooding in anyway.
What about parking? Chaos at the library, chaos on Main Street, the best 25 spots downtown are now taken up by the Gunn House. The only idea they have come up with is putting a vehicle bridge over Dead Man’s Creek and that idea has been on the books since 1970, hardly innovative, and people are still not going to park there to go shopping. It will help with the library expanding its use (doubling capacity). We have to remember that when the library was built no extra parking was added, they only paved over an existing municipal lot. And now they want to take away half the spots in Parker Harding and get rid of all the spots at Jesup Green’s Taylor lot.
The P&Z will never pass any of these suggestions, let alone embrace them as a whole.
And now they say they don’t want to destroy the “small town character”, no, now they only want to complete it…..Ha-Ha-Ha.
The way they talk about “completing” downtown only leads me to believe that the agenda all along was to develop more buildings on town owned land – at the expense of parking. That is why they tell us that the plan should be embraced as a whole.
So you see, now we have to create more space on the shelf to put this plan, before they even finish it. It is doomed like every downtown master plan for the last 40 years. Each item needs to be passed individually – sorry — that is how downtown works.
It’s all so obvious to me because I have been watching downtown for more than 40 years. My mom used to take me to the meetings when I was a little kid. I have no stake in the game. I am just watching.
What I see is the same mistake being made over and over again. Appoint a committee, an unauthorized, non-elected, abstract theoretical committee to oversee their own ideas, with no chance ever of implementation.
What a waste of valuable energy and public good will.