Panel asking for ideas
CONNELLSVILLE – The city’s Blueprint Communities committee is looking for a few good ideas as to how to make the community a better place to live, work, raise children and play. The five-member panel, which includes city Mayor Judy Reed, city redevelopment authority executive director Ralph Wombacker, city clerk David Pinkosky, businessman Dick Oglevee and PNC Bank representative Michele Ruth, will meet with residents, students, business owners, civic organization representatives and others interested in improving the city today at 7 p.m. at the Connellsville Community Center.
“We’re looking for ways to make our city better,” said Wombacker of the community meeting. “We have an opportunity through the Blueprint Communities initiative to do some very significant and positive projects, but we need input from residents.”
In August, Connellsville was selected for the Blueprint Communities inaugural program that encourages small rural areas to develop a reasonable revitalization plan and then initiate the project. The Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) of Pittsburgh in cooperation with other funding and program partners formulated the initiative.
The public meeting is the second phase of the program. Last month, the five participated in a two-day session at Hidden Valley conducted by The Heartland Center for Leadership Development, an independent, non-profit organization based in Lincoln, Neb.
“There are so many long-range plans on shelves gathering dust; we want to develop a plan that the city can reasonably do,” said Wombacker. “We could come up with some grandiose, pie-in-the-sky projects, but those are not going to happen in Connellsville. We need to be realistic.”
The program, said Wombacker, encourages a holistic approach to devising a project.
“We just can’t look at housing or downtown revitalization,” he said. “We have to look at everything – recreational opportunities, neighborhoods, the downtown, the city’s image and other facets.”
Wombacker, who has lived and worked in the area for nearly three decades said that the former leading coke-producing community has many positive attributes that can be built upon, if the city residents and business owners band together with officials to make the project work.
Wombacker, along with authority administrative assistant Paula Grubach, recently toured the city to document both the city’s positive assets and those areas that are in need of revitalization and found there to be “plenty of both.”
“We have some very nice homes and neighborhoods and a beautiful river and bike trail,” he said. “And, we also have some areas that need a lot of attention.”
Grubach and Pinkosky prepared the successful Blueprint Communities application for the city.
To finance any projects, Wombacker said that the state has a pool of available funding, but in most cases, the city will also be required to defray a portion of the overall costs.
FHLB members, which include PNC Bank and other financial institutions, are jointly working with communities to make the projects affordable.
Neil Cotiaux, FHLB spokesman, said earlier that the program participants have shown a willingness to devise a successful project.
“When we looked at the applications, we saw that each of these 22 (applicants) were dead serious about making progress as quickly as they can.
“They showed an ability to pull together a diverse team of leaders and displayed an understanding of the commitment to the program. This is not a walk in the park; it is going to take hours and hours to complete. They all demonstrated a willingness to undertake this rigorous work.”
Today’s public meeting will be held in the community center’s auditorium located on the second floor.