LEWISTON — City planner Brian Wright picked the image for the poster advertising the Legacy Lewiston Planapalooza pretty carefully.
It’s a brightly colored photograph that depicts a vacant Lisbon Street lot, a decayed space left empty that’s instantly recognizable as being Lewiston.
“I know people hate it, but we do it on purpose,” Wright, principal of Town Planning and Urban Design Collaborative, told city councilors Tuesday. “We try and do things that are a bit irritating so people say, ‘Ah, I can’t believe that of all the things you could have taken pictures of in our town, you had to choose that.'”
Wright said he’d heard Lewiston had its share of burned-out, vacant lots and that it’s a problem. That’s why he picked that picture and put a caption across the top that read: “Can You Imagine A Better Future? Participate!”
“The thing that’s great is that the people who complain about this poster, it means they care,” Wright said. “And as long as they care, you can accomplish whatever you want to accomplish.”
Wright and his team will take up residence at 219 Lisbon St. for a week later this month for an intensive, five-day planning session designed to help plot a future for the city.
The team and the city plan multiple public meetings and tours and will have regular drop-in hours for residents to stop by and speak their minds.
It’s part of the city’s Comprehensive Plan process. State law requires towns and cities to draw up long-term plans to help shape zoning and development decisions, and Lewiston’s plan is out of date.
Wright promised city councilors and residents something different than the staid process and the dry, statistics-laden type of comprehensive plan most cities adopt.
“Most have 80, 90, 100 pages of writing and then another 150 pages of studies that support the rest,” he said. “It’s full of facts and figures and statistics and other things that are somewhat interesting. But what we find is most of it is not relevant.”
Wright said his team’s process seeks to find the relevant data and present it in a more graphically interesting manner.
“This is the way people read and understand information,” he said. “And that lets them understand the data and find the relationships in it.”
The Planapalooza is scheduled for June 20-25, with an opening presentation at 6 p.m. Thursday, June 20, at the Lewiston Public Library. The next two days will be filled with round-table meetings for business and elected leaders and discussions about open space, transportation, housing and the economy, and open studio meetings with residents at 219 Lisbon St.
The plan will get a public review at 6 p.m. June 23 and a closing presentation at 6 p.m. June 25 at the library. The team will close its office but will continue to work on the comprehensive plan.
“I call it the end of the beginning,” Wright said.
He hopes to help Lewiston plan something unique and wonderful that will attract new people, development and investment to the community. There are two ways to bring in economic development, he said: give away financial incentives or create something cool in the community that investors want to be part of.
“I’d rather you not have to make the best deal,” he said. “I’d rather you be able to offer people the coolest thing.”
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