Planners want to hear from public on future of Community Maritime Park, former ECUA property
Jim Little
Anyone who wants to help write the plan for the future of Community Maritime Park and an undeveloped 19-acre piece of downtown Pensacola property will get their chance to do that next month.
Urban planning expert Jeff Speck and urban planning firm DPZ will have meetings in Pensacola on April 9 and April 11 to hear the public's ideas for Maritime Park and the former Emerald Coast Utilities Authority sewage treatment plant site, Studer Properties has announced. Meeting times and locations have yet to be announced.
The goal of the plan is to connect the park properties, Bruce Beach and the 19-acre, Studer-owned former ECUA property to the broader downtown area.
Studer Properties hired Speck, DPZ and Weitzman Associates LLC to write the master plan for the project, called the West Main Master Plan project.
The entire study area for the project is looking at an area within five minutes of walking distance to the Maritime Park and former ECUA properties, a boundary approximately south of Intendencia Street between B Street and Palafox Street.
"We always look at the five-minute walk," Speck said. "Because the five-minute walk is the standard, historically, of neighborhoods, not just American neighborhoods, but globally throughout history. Most neighborhoods are about a five-minute walk from edge to center, and so we use the five-minute walk measure around the center of the neighborhood also as a likely area of influence.”
Speck, a former CivicCon speaker, said the planners are interested in creating more pedestrian activity in the area so a five-minute walk was the good way to draw the boundaries of the study area.
“The way we like to put it is, if the walk is nice, then five minutes is the distance at which you will feel dumb driving," Speck said.
Studer Properties President Andrew Rothfeder said in a press release that the master plan is a result of consistent themes from CivicCon speakers who have emphasized the importance for communities to have a clear plan for the future.
CivicCon is a joint project of the News Journal and the Studer Community Institute intended to make Pensacola a better place to live, work, grow and invest through smart planning and civic conversations.
"Almost every CivicCon speaker, in some way or another, told us that our community needed a plan to govern our future development," Rothfeder said. "They also told us that our communities needed to be connected, walkable, and that our waterfront should be accessible."
The West Main project being completed by Studer Properties is not affiliated with the SCAPE waterfront plan, which is being done by the Center for Civic Engagement, the "action arm" of CivicCon.
The West Main project will be done in two phases, a research phase and a design phase.
Peter Bazeli, principal at Weitzman Associates and another former CivicCon speaker, will be conducting market research for the project, as well as a marketability study to determine what types of developments for the properties would be most successful.
Speck and DPZ will use that information and public input gathered from Pensacola residents to develop a final draft of the plan this summer.
Speck said they rely on local residents to participate in the public meetings to teach the designers about the local community.
“Our experience in doing these plans is that the ideas that you don't think of are the ones that come from local people," Speck said. "I always say it's important when you're designing a place to not live there, because when you live in a place, you're painfully aware of all the short-term limitations."
"We plan out 10 years and 20 years," he continued. "And when you're planning 10 and 20 years out, that assumes a lot of things can change that the short-term limitations would foreclose on. However, because we're not from there, we will do our best to get up to speed, but we will never understand Pensacola the way the locals do."
Jim Little can be reached at jwlittle@pnj.com and 850-208-9827.