AUBURN — Planners and city staff are ready to unveil their vision and a master plan for redeveloping New Auburn’s core over the next 20 years.
City Planner Doug Greene said representatives from planning firm VHB Consultants and landscape architect Sam Coplon are ready to show how the area from Broad and Mill streets up to the confluence of the Androscoggin and Little Androscoggin rivers can be redeveloped and made more vital.
“We will be unveiling a phasing plan that will illustrate how we think the ultimate master plan, with designs, can be put into place over the next five to 20 years,” Greene said.
The presentation is scheduled for 6 p.m. Thursday, May 19, in the former St. Louis Church, 32 Dunn St.
The effort continues work started in 2011 with the New Auburn Master Plan that suggested creating a downtown village area and rerouting some traffic around it. Work continued with 2014’s New Auburn Village Center and Transportation plan.
The most recent work calls for constructing a park and trail area along the Little Androscoggin and redesigning Second Street to become pedestrian-friendly, lined with buildings on one side that could contain shops, restaurants and new housing. The goals of the plan are to increase property values, bring in investment, attract new residents and create an urban, walkable village center.
“We’ve been putting that all together and working towards an implementation plan that shows the designs while understanding that we can’t do all of these things at one time,” Greene said. “It would be impossible to fund all of these things at one time, plus there will have to be some land acquisitions and other things.”
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