Interview with the City Manager
There’s a new thing of interest currently in the first floor lobby of the City Building. Tell us about that. – Yes, the Doors of Opportunity. This first completed door is in the City Building on the ground floor right now. This is the first of multiple doors, which are original to Edward Lee McClain High School. The doors have been salvaged and repurposed by David and John King. This idea has been worked on for a couple years. Each pane of glass in the door represents a different historical figure from Greenfield’s past. On each side of the door are photos with a QR code, which, when scanned, takes you directly to that individual’s information on the Greenfield Historical Society’s website. These doors will be located throughout town and rotated to different locations. We want them to be a talking point, an attraction, a connection, and we want people to walk around town and try to find all of them. As more of these doors are completed, we will notify the public. If the weather permits, we would like to roll this first piece outside during the first First Friday event of the year, which is May 5 beginning at 5 p.m. in downtown Greenfield.
These Doors of Opportunity, while not telling the same story, kind of align with the bench and sculpture projects we are working on where we are recognizing very specific individuals.
The sculptures are done and set to be delivered very soon. The granite benches will bear information regarding the subject of the sculpture as well as a QR code to access more information about that individual. While specific locations are still being discussed, we are hopeful the bench/sculpture pieces will be done and installed within the next month.
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At a council meeting last month, you talked about Greenfield projects having been assigned a planner through a grant program. Tell us more about that. – OHM Advisors has been assigned as our procured planner through the Appalachian Community Grant. This is to develop plans, which will be submitted later this fall for funding consideration through the grant program, for those projects. We submitted six projects, and three were chosen for this planning phase with OHM Advisors. One of those three is the parks district, which includes Felson and Mitchell parks, the cemetery, and the quarry. Within that plan we want to build a dog park, an amphitheater, a natural playground, and we want to create trails that connect all of the parks to one another. Another one is for planning regarding a boutique hotel in the downtown so when people are coming in from out of town, there are accommodations available to them. The third project in the planning with OHM Advisors is for a downtown streetscape, and what we are looking at here is wider sidewalks, which would allow for more outdoor seating opportunities for our restaurants and retail; back-in diagonal parking, which would allow for more parking; a bike lane; new lights with speakers and lights in the trees, both things to be utilized during events and coordinated to specific seasons, like festive lighting at Christmastime with Christmas music playing through the speakers or red, white, and blue lighting on July 4th with patriotic tunes played through the speakers. We saw this in another small community and it would be a great touch to our downtown area.
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You can reach City Manager Todd Wilkin at citymanager@greenfieldohio.net
