(title swooshing) (upbeat music) - Welcome to "At Issue."

I'm H Wayne Wilson.

Thank you as always for joining us this time for a conversation about some improvements in Uptown in Normal and also what plans there are for a park along Peoria's riverfront.

We'll talk about the riverfront in the second half of this program, but first, let's turn our attention to Uptown South.

It's an eight acre addition to what is already known as Uptown in Uptown Normal and to have the conversation is Mercy Davison.

Mercy is a town planner for the town of Normal.

Thank you for being with us.

- Well, thanks for having me.

- Before we get into Uptown South, there's another critical component to this.

It's the underpass.

There's always been a problem with how do you get across the railroad tracks, and that's particularly true with Uptown South being added.

What's the status of the underpass?

- So the underpass is getting close to complete design documents, which is really exciting, which will permit us to then put the project out for bids sometime in spring of 2023.

And then we hope to get started with construction in the summer, and it's gonna be about a two year construction project.

- And it's just strictly going to be under the tracks.

But what kind of entrance is there on either side?

Would that be near the Town Hall and the Children's Discovery Museum in Uptown?

- Yes, so on the north side of the railroad tracks, the underpass will basically be what is now the plaza space between City Hall and the Children's Discovery Museum.

So there will be a trail that leads you down to the underpass, and then on the south side of the tracks, you'll emerge into kind of an amphitheater area, we have a little more room on the south side of course, and so there'll be some terrace seating and an amphitheater area and the trail will continue through there.

- Now with regard to Uptown South, it's about an eight acre plot of land, but the town doesn't own all of it, at least not now.

- That's correct.

We own most of the property over there.

There is a small apartment building on the Southwest corner and then there's a former dentist office building at 305 South Linden, and it used to have multiple dentist offices in it.

The town owns half of that building now, and the other half is still occupied by a couple of dental offices.

- And of course the police department and Parks and Rec are in what is will be Uptown South.

- That's correct, they're in the area.

- We have graphics to show, but can you give us an idea of the boundaries and what it might look like just in broad terms?

- Sure, so the area we're talking about is bounded by Linden on the east, Irving Street on the south, the Constitution Trail on the west, and then the railroad tracks on the north.

The underpass itself on the south side will take about an acre.

And so that leaves us, you know, still a nice chunk of ground to work with.

The overall master plan right now is showing one public street going through the space, basically taking you from Taylor Street across Linden and then south down to Irving, so that would be the one main street.

And the area could be developed in phases where the parks and rec and police structures would stay where they are and we could develop on the east side of that road.

But ultimately, the plan is for quite a bit of residential and potentially some commercial uses on the first floors.

We're also looking at potentially a parking deck and maybe one larger structure that might not be entirely residential.

So there's, you know, it's conceptual, but it's pretty exciting.

- [Wilson] There's a plan for some surface, limited surface parking?

- Yes, and all those details would be worked out, but there would be a bit of surface parking associated with the other structures as well.

- I want to talk more about parking because one of the problems is in what now is Uptown, it's difficult to drop somebody off at the Amtrak station.

You can park in the deck, but most people just wanna pull up and that's an active street.

And then also, about buses coming in to the Children's Discovery Museum.

So have you accommodated both those concerns?

- Yes, yes.

And that was something we heard a lot right at the beginning of the process from both of those constituencies.

And so the current, the master plan shows a pull-off area where up to three buses could unload on the side of the street that goes through Uptown South, and the people on the bus would just cut across the green space and go through the underpass.

There's also potential for some drop-off space on the west side of the site.

And if you take a look at that, that's not town that's owned by the, that's not property owned by the town right now, but it's a concept plan so it's long term.

- You're trying to address walkability, bikeability?

Are there plans for a bike lane on this new street?

- Yes, so the new street that would go through this space would be very low traffic and slow moving anyway.

So bicycling would be relatively comfortable.

Not exactly sure what the treatment would be, whether it would be bike lanes or sharrows.

Hard to say right now but it will definitely be bike friendly.

- And in terms of the environment, the street will be, might it be pervious?

- You know, it's hard to say.

That's a level of detail we're not really at yet, but we will certainly have to look at storm water drainage, storm water detention.

And when you start talking about that, any permeable surfaces you can incorporate help.

So whether that's a portion of the streets, whether it's the boulevard that goes down the middle of the street, maybe that's an area where we collect some storm water.

We really haven't gotten there yet, but it's definitely on the radar.

- When you did a survey of residents last July, number one, 86% said green, we want green space, we want some sort of, you know, open area.

- Right, right.

- Now you mentioned that little boulevard area on the street.

Are there more opportunities for green space?

- Yeah, so that's one green space.

It's a really healthy boulevard area, so it wouldn't feel like you were just in the middle of the street, there's some opportunity there.

There's also a larger park area that would be adjacent to the underpass amphitheater area, basically right where those buses pull off.

So there's kind of two primary green spaces.

And then keep in mind that urban green spaces along the streets can be really high quality as well.

When you think of the street scapes in Uptown Normal, the trees, the beautiful landscaped beds, it really softens the whole environment up and provide, it really feels good.

So we can do both of those things.

- Real quickly, the architects have a term called outdoor room.

- Right.

- [Wilson] Is is that related to the green space?

- You know, it can be, and it's kind of like how you, how the green space relates to human built structures.

So if you have human built structures that surround a space, that can create the feeling of a room outside, you're clearly outside, but there are walls and those walls are the buildings.

The walls can also be trees and things like that.

But the feeling of enclosure is something a lot of architects like.

- Well, around that topic, in Uptown, the circle, is that plan to have buildings completely surround that, correct?

- Yep, yep.

- [Wilson] Because it's only half.

- Exactly.

So Uptown Circle right now has three of what will be five buildings surrounding it.

So right now you've got the Children's Museum, Uptown Station, and then a privately owned mixed use building on the west side.

There's two more spaces for buildings on the north area.

A circle doesn't have sides, but those buildings should be coming in the next couple years and then you'll have the outdoor room.

- So there might be some outdoor room in south?

- Entirely possible.

Yeah, depending on how the buildings are adjacent to that green space.

- What about the type of buildings?

How high, will there be retail or commercial on the bottom floor, et cetera?

- Yeah, as it is envisioned now, they would be mixed use, but primarily residential.

So all the upper stories would almost certainly be residential.

Even the first floors could involve a component of residential, maybe the commercial space is shallower, hard to say, and we're just living in such a transitional time now with how people use their own residences and how people use commercial spaces.

You know, we're just, people have changed their shopping habits, they've changed their going to work habits.

So it's built in to be flexible, but it should involve some, not purely residential.

- The survey from last July, there seemed to be significant interest in a grocery store.

What role does the town of Normal play in trying to establish a grocery store somewhere in the Uptown or Uptown South area?

- Yeah, so we certainly play a role partly because we are the primary landowner in Uptown South, but a grocery has been a goal of the Uptown plan for now two decades because having grocery near your residences is really important.

It is tough to do.

There are a lot of grocery stores in Bloomington Normal right now.

And again, talk about people's habits changing, you know, how people grocery shop has changed radically in the last few years.

So it's hard to know what a grocery store looks like right now, but we are certainly gonna talk about it and, you know, see if there are opportunities.

- Is there, the parking deck that's planned, about 240 spaces, is that, I mean if you're going to have so many residential units, then you'll need that parking deck.

I mean will that be where residents might park or will there be some other place for them to park?

- You know, and of course, it's a concept, so we have to dig into all of these details, but whatever you build, it is gonna require parking so, and whether you can accomplish that all on a surface parking lot, it just depends on how much you wanna do over there.

So certainly something we're talking about, but I would assume that, and the plan shows some additional parking that's associated with each of the other buildings that could be built over there, but it wouldn't be probably enough.

- So it might be surface parking or it might be incorporated into the second floor or the first floor of a building?

- It's possible.

You could have some parking that's partially under building.

You could have some that's fully underground.

And then the parking deck itself would, I'm sure would serve, if there were a parking deck, it would serve residential and commercial.

- And will the residential be what we typically call multi-family?

We're not talking about individual?

- No, individual standalone single family homes, that's not in the cards, but it could be a combination of what you think of as an apartment and it could have some town home elements to it or four plexes.

They don't all have to be a large scale apartment building.

There could be a mixture.

- The town council has, I mean they're aware of this all along, but when will the final master plan, which I understand is subject to improvements or changes as needed, when will they see this?

- We anticipate taking it to them late January or February.

So that will be the final presentation of the plan and then next steps.

What would we do next to make to move this forward?

- And the council might have some input into saying, I'd like to see this or that?

- Absolutely, and they have been consulted with individually prior to now even.

So we have some of their input already and some of them have popped into the public meetings so yep.

- One thing we have to talk about real briefly, the cul-de-sac off of Irving and that more or less kind of creates a bottleneck when you want to get to Constitution Trail.

So have you accommodated the wishes of many, many people that said get rid of the cul-de-sac?

- So we're looking into that and when you look at the master plan, you'll see that the cul-de-sac is gone.

It's kind of a modified version of a street over there because there are some properties that need access to a public street, but right now there's no connection to the trail that's, and that's a miss, like we would really like to improve that.

So it is an opportunity back there to do something better than what we have right now.

And you're right, people were interested in it and the plan reflects that.

- Real quickly, is there a deadline for getting all this accomplished or is it gonna be gradual like Uptown was gradual?

- I think it will be gradual.

- And with that, Mercy Davison, Town Planner for the town of Normal, thank you so much for being with us on that issue.

- Well thanks for having me.

- And we'll be back in just a moment with a look at plans for Peoria's riverfront park.

We turn our attention now to Peoria's riverfront.

You'll recall numerous years ago that the Riverfront Village, you may know it as The Pad, was torn down and there's been anticipation as to what will replace The Pad.

Well, it's much broader than that.

We're going to have a discussion going about what's going to replace everything from the Bob Michael Bridge all the way up to north of the Murray Baker Bridge.

And to have that conversation, I've invited Patrick Uruch here.

Patrick is a city manager for the City of Peoria.

Patrick, as always, thank you for joining us.

- Thanks, H. - And also with us is the Vice President of TERRA Engineering, George Ghareeb.

George, thank you for joining us.

- Thank you for having us.

- I want to turn to Patrick.

Just a real brief preview of how did you acquire The Pad property and what ensued after that?

- So the Riverfront Village property, The Pad, was held in in ownership by Wisdom Development Corporation and then the Downtown Development Corporation purchased it with the intent that we'd look at trying to reimagine and revisit the park.

So once they acquired that land six years ago, we began the process of starting this discussion about what do we want to do and how do we want to envision this riverfront from bridge to bridge?

And that's the way that we, we kind of started this process back then.

- And why so long?

- Well, there's been a number of reasons.

One, we needed to look at funding and look at how we could com up with the money.

And fortunately, we have been able to get a $15 million grant from the State of Illinois.

Those dollars have been authorized in the state's budget, but they haven't been appropriated yet.

Some of that is because of the funding streams that they're coming from.

It's coming out of the state's capital budget and some of that is reliant on the Chicago casino being up and running, which still isn't up and running so that's.

- There may be a longer delay yet.

- Well, and there may be other opportunities for us to look at other revenue streams since the project has been authorized.

- And we probably, George, should we remind everybody that this is for the most part in a flood plain, which restricts what you can do?

- Absolutely.

So you can't really build any buildings or any structures.

And throughout the design process, we made sure that we, we are complying with the requirements from NEPA and flood plains and all of that.

- What I wanna do is, is go through from the south end at the Bob Michael bridge all the way north and just identify some of the items.

Some of these are real brief and people understand, but others take some time.

Items one and two are a dog park.

Describe the dog parks real briefly, George.

- This came throughout the public involvement process.

We had a public involvement process for about probably two, three years.

That's partially why the delay in seeing actual plans came in.

And this was recommended by people who are currently living now along, you know, Water Street and new developments.

They wanted to see a dog park there.

So that's probably primarily, one is a small dog park and one is a large dog park.

- One for small, one for large, that makes a lot of sense to me.

Then we go to three and four on the map and that's a fitness and game courts, George.

- Yes, so these are flexible, nothing is finalized yet, but we are talking to some contributors as well that we can put outside fitness courts that they can provide grants for something like that.

And it could be basketball, it could be volleyball, it could be actual fitness, outside fitness gaming center.

- Outside is the key word.

Turning to the kayak launch and the barge park next.

Literally a kayak launch that will be, you will actually be able to go down into the river?

- Yes, you will actually have an entrance to go down and you can launch your canoes from there or kayak and just, at least you can get to experience the river a little bit more and you can stay in touch with the river.

And the barge, we've seen that happening actually in one of the events here in Peoria and just gave us a really tremendous opportunity.

And one of the main reasons for the barges is the discontinuity that is available now with the trail.

Kind of you go through and you hit a big building there that the trail is not connected.

So with the barge, you can come and walk slowly and it becomes like a green roof and walk around and continue- - [Wilson] You'll be walking on the barge?

- [George] You'll be actually walking.

and it is like a park actually on the barge.

- Alright.

Then next, the playground.

Of course, we have to have a playground.

- Of course, for kids.

And this is still, the material or what happens with the playground is still up in the air.

So we're still going through some public enrollment processes to align that.

- Patrick, the next item, and actually, it's on the south and the north, it's throughout, it's the walking and biking path.

- Right, one of the things that we wanted to do is we wanted to bring the people closer to the river.

And as we started to go through the planning process, we wanted to figure out how we could, instead of having parking, for example, closer to the river, we wanted to look at how we could create the amenity space really almost from the river side of River Station along in that stretch.

If you notice on the plan, we tried to maximize the amount of activity space along the riverfront in that stretch.

And that's the reason why the paths and the walking trails try and stay closer to the river.

- If we look at the map, we see number nine is the front porch terrace.

Now George, that's going to need some explanation.

A front porch terrace.

Obviously, it's on the edge of the river.

- It's actually on the edge of the river.

It makes people come closer to the river and then experience the, this is our main asset in Peoria, it's a big asset having the river there.

So having that porch there, having the continuity with the river is very, very important We thought through the process.

- Patrick, number 10 is the marina.

There's a marina already.

- There is.

The marina is closer towards the CEFCU Stage and near Main Street.

And what we're planning on doing is moving the marina more into a center location of the park itself.

So it would be closer to Liberty Street would be where the main part of the marina would be located.

And that's the intent behind that is to, you know, make that more prominently displayed on the riverfront right there.

- And for those of you not knowing the streets, Liberty is the one that comes down between the old River Station and the parking lot to the south of there.

Go ahead, George.

- No, I was gonna say, also the relocation of the marina wanted to accommodate some small boats and large boats.

The current marina now is structurally small.

- [Wilson] Moving on, let's talk about 11, 12 and 13.

And that's just, I'll call it family oriented.

What all will be involved there?

- It's an open space.

It's, people can use it for picnics.

They can come and play with their kids.

Mostly open for, we don't want to have the park on the riverfront only for the riverfront people.

It's for all of Peoria or for all the communities, so people can come from north, from south and play and have picnics and socialize.

- And one of the things I noticed is there's play mounds, George.

What is a play mound and why?

- It's actually, so if we wanted to, again, this has to be continuous with all the surroundings.

So we talked to the Riverfront Museum, part of the public involvement and the Riverfront Museum has their own master plan that they're working on.

So part of that, they have terrains or mounds that we call them.

So if you stand on top of the Riverfront Museum and you look towards the river, the whole thing will be continuous to you.

So you'll see the mounds going up and down.

And again, people can use it to play or they can use it to sit if you have, because one of the areas there is still the big grounds, big green park.

You can have a concert there, you can have a farmer's market there so people can sit and watch and relax.

- Let's mention the farmer's market.

That's number 14 on the map.

Farmer's market of course has always been downtown, but will this be different?

- So it'll be a little bit different in terms of the layout of where it rests, but this would be kind of still on the south side of, or excuse me, on the north side of River Station.

But really what we're looking at is also utilizing what we're calling the Great Lawn here, where we have paths that walk around the Great Lawn or kind of an elliptical side or shape that will be able to accommodate the vendors from the farmer's market.

The farmer's market is such a huge success and it's such a huge piece of vibrancy in this city to have that market every Saturday morning during the summertime.

And we want to make sure that we support that and enhance it and make sure that it still retains the unique character that it has.

- And George, Patrick mentioned the Great Lawn, which is number 15, but number 16 right adjacent to it is a terrace seat edge.

That needs explanation.

- As I mentioned before, the river is our big asset and we wanted to bring people as close as possible while staying safe closer to the river.

So we have the terrace, sort of like stairs, wide stairs that people can sit and walk and have picnics and you can go have your lunch and just watch the river.

- [Wilson] And then 17 and 18, memorial and the clock tower.

Not too much is going to change there?

- No.

Little bit actually, there will be some changes because we're are putting in a new water feature there.

And so that practically will be the main entrance to the riverfront market.

And then we're relocating the memorial from the north side all the way to the front entrance so we can showcase that.

- Patrick, number 19, the replacement for the spirit of Peoria, real briefly, what is in play there?

- So the city is working on a request for proposals to solicit another boat.

And that's one of the things that we're gonna look at is trying to find another type of recreational vehicle that we'll be able to park right there.

- [Wilson] Number 20, art and sound garden, George.

- Yes, so we wanted to showcase local artists from Peoria.

We wanted to showcase the history of Peoria.

So these will be sort of monuments that gives us back a little bit of the history of Peoria.

- And '21, the observation deck.

- Observation deck, that will actually, partially will have dual purpose.

One will act as a protection for the future spirit of Peoria and as well as an observation deck where people can walk in and just observe.

- [Wilson] 22 And 23, George are very interesting, a water feature and a floating wetland.

- Yes so we have, part of this is to generate the beauty of the river and get people, again, as I said, closer to the river.

So right now, the area is a little bit mucky, so we're generating it to make it look a little bit nicer in that area.

- Patrick, 24 and 29 are staging areas and multipurpose lots.

They'll be used for what would become 25 and 26, the festival grounds.

- Correct, our main festival park, the festival grounds on the park will stay where they are.

We're really using the space around the gateway building to be that staging area for that.

- [Wilson] And then number 27, the naturalized river edge.

- Once again, instead of mucky, make it natural beauty.

- [Wilson] Patrick, how long before we see any construction?

- Well, we're still waiting on the state grant.

Hopefully, we'll have some positive news this year about that.

Once we see that, that we've got those dollars in place, we're gonna be moving forward.

- And in terms of the cost, Patrick mentioned the $15 million.

This is subject to change, depending on money and depending on other issues?

- Absolutely, that's still flexible.

This is a concept plan so we haven't gone into the details.

The prices could go up.

Construction prices are going up routinely now, constantly.

So this could go up and we could tweak the design a little bit to make it less, more feasible, more feasible.

- In 15 seconds, Patrick, what does this mean to the city of Peoria when it comes to fruition?

- This is our front door.

This is the heart of the region and we need to have a park that's there for everyone and that's what we're hoping this will be.

- And I say thank you to you, Patrick Urich, the city manager for the City of Peoria, and George Ghareeb, vice president of TERRA Engineering.

- Thank you very much.

- Thank you.

- Thank you both for being on "At Issue".

Next time, diversity and inclusion, we have a City of Peoria representative, Peoria County and the City of Bloomington talking about inclusion and diversity on the next "At Issue".

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