City officials look for better link from downtown to campus
Nicole Laidlaw often uses the city streets just north of Central Michigan University to walk and visit with friends who live on Main Street.
But the Oxford freshman said she would feel more comfortable and safe if there were lights to guide her way.
"The only time I'm down here, it's always at night," Laidlaw said. "More people would come this way if there were lights."
The addition of lighting is just one of the things on city officials' minds, as hopes to create a more cohesive connection between CMU's campus and downtown Mount Pleasant turns into a conceptual plan of construction for Main Street.
Michelle Sponseller, director of Downtown Development, has been researching things to include in such a project.
Items such as poetry stamped into sidewalk cement and florescent paint, which could show something like a glowing CMU logo at night, are just a couple ideas she has been exploring.
"We're thinking about the possibility of mini-circles about every block or every other block, but that's up in the air right now," Sponseller said. "If we can, we want to put in possibly a bike path, different kinds of angled parking or reverse-angled parking."
Main Street, and correspondingly Washington Street, would be converted from one-way streets into two-way streets.
At an estimated $250,000, the project was originally introduced at a recent Mount Pleasant City Commission work session for fund-designation in a mini-stimulus project.
Though most might agree it was not the best place to introduce the idea, Sponseller said it has been in discussion for the last five months and may be more aggressively pursued in the fall.
City Manager Kathie Grinzinger said officials would like to hold meetings with people who live on Main Street to discover what they would want out of the project.
What Sponseller called a design charrette, or printouts of an area map, would be used to illustrate what residents ideas might be.
Sponseller said the projects could begin in the fall, even before a shovel breaks ground in spring 2010.
"We know that is always going to be student housing. It's been student housing for 80 years," Grinzinger said. "So when we treat that hunk of the community like a unique and special place ... let's build it for them."
The plan is also hoping to bring more residents to the downtown area, Sponseller said, by way of creating an inviting path to get there.
"There's already a traffic flow between downtown and campus via Main Street," she said. "But this will really tie it together."
It might also help, Laidlaw said, to attract students toward downtown because from her experience, most students might not go north of High Street.
"If I go downtown, I always use Main Street," she said.
Another hope for many city officials is to work more with the university on the future projects.
Linda Slater, CMU director of Plant Engineering and Planning, said in an e-mail that she is aware of the city's plan to create a campus/downtown connection, but that CMU has not stated any preference.
"I believe there will be discussion about this in the future," she said. "Facilities Management values the partnership we have with the city. We continue to share ideas and information in support of both the campus and the Mount Pleasant community."
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