Published: January 12, 2008 05:04 pm      

Downtown

Master plan picture coming into focus

San Marcos — After more than nine months of community workshops and open forums, a draft document of the Downtown Master Plan should be completed by early February, Chief Planner Andy Alcarón said last week.

“We're at the point where we've gotten a lot of input from the community at large and our consultants have come up with some very preliminary recommendations,” Alcarón said.

The hired consultants, Broaddus and Associates, who also helped Texas State University develop its master plan, recently unveiled a PowerPoint presentation which it described as the culmination of all the previous workshops and forums.

An encore of that presentation was given to the San Marcos Council of Neighborhood Associations lat week at the city's public library.

“It's not unanimous, it's a consensus,” Scott Gregson, Downtown Master Plan task force member, said of the presentation. “There are issues we will agree with, there are issues we will disagree with.”

The presentation paints an aesthetically pleasing picture of what downtown San Marcos could look like 20 years from now. It has a dense downtown center, with tree-lined streets, different villages or districts, unique stores, expanded sidewalks and slower traffic.

And with increased density comes taller buildings.

“It's a question of density,” said Amy Kirwin, Downtown Master Plan task force chair. “We have to build up.”

The increased height limits on buildings is one of the more controversial recommendations.

Camille S. Phillips, president of the Council of Neighborhood Associations, said she does not like the potential for decreased visibility.

But Kirwin said with the growing population, the city can either go the urban sprawl route and build on top of the Edwards Aquifer, or the city can create a dense downtown center.

The suggested concepts stretch beyond downtown because people first need to know that it's there. So the consultants suggest gateways from IH-35 lead people to downtown.

“The city needs to be branded with some type of identity,” said Gregson, noting the river.

He said marketing and consistency is essential for success of the plan.

“We need to utilize the river as a significant anchorage point of effective marketing to brand our city,” he said.

For the master plan to be effective, rules need to be put in place to implement the plan.

“It's not just the city, it's private individuals who would follow the rules and regulations put in by the city,” Kirwin said. “Then those rules have to be enforced.”

One concern expressed by Council of Neighborhood Associations members was the lack of business and development code regulations.

“Several downtown business owners won't spend any money on their buildings,” Gregson said. “As a community, if we don't have that pride, those properties are sold as investment properties to someone to maximize their return.”

Both Gregson and Kirwin said the best way residents can get their voices heard is through a grassroots effort.

“Tell City Council we want strict architectural standards,” Kirwin said. “We want whatever tougher landscape ordinances for downtown. We have to tell City Council that's what we want done because that's when they will take that initiative. They are getting pressure from the other side to not do it, extreme pressure.”

San Marcos resident Sherwood Bishop expressed similar concern.

“The biggest problem largely comes down to politics,” he said.

“There are a lot of people that have a lot of money whose main interest is cutting costs and making bigger profits. And so you talk about things like having people to pay for beautification, or you talk about other regulations, whether it's protecting the aquifer or developing more parks, and a lot of the big corporations or big developers just don't give a damn about that. What they want to do is make more money and they often have a lot of political clout.”