This Saturday
Bridging Broadway will host its third and final community dialogue to discuss how to maximize the benefit that a new casino will have on Cincinnati.
The dialogues, which began last year, will inform a report that Bridging Broadway will submit to the City in mid-April, making recommendations that could guide the City's interactions and negotiations with the casino in the future.
The first dialogue was an on-foot walkabout that circled the Casino site and took inventory of the site's immediate surroundings, and potential corridors that could link the Casino to other downtown neighborhoods. The second dialogue was an "envisioning session" that mapped out the types of physical and social improvements that residents wanted to see happen in those areas. This third dialogue will introduce tools that could help the community achieve those improvements, according to Bridging Broadway's founder and director Stephen Samuels.
"Now that we know what we want, how do we make it happen?" Samuels asked. "How do we fund it, how do we implement it and how do we sustain it?"
Speakers will include leaders from
Downtown Cincinnati Incorporated, the
Uptown Consortium,
LISC and
ArtsWave. These organizations have experience with some of the "tools" like special improvement districts, tax increment financing and arts funding that could support positive changes in the areas around the casino, and help make it a more cohesive district.
"I personally would like to bring examples of other LISC sites around the country and how they dealt with the impact of things like a casino. In some cities it's been a rail line and in some cities it's been development on a riverfront," LISC Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky's executive director Kathy Schwab said. "It's so much easier to deal with crime and safety and some of the other things that might crop up before you build the thing and it's up and running."
Schwab will discuss a couple of instances where community benefits agreements have helped communities win specific benefits from a development.
Margy Waller, Vice President for Arts and Culture Partnerships for ArtsWave said she will share information about potential grant funding for public art, particularly public art that promotes wayfinding between the Casino and other Cincinnati neighborhoods. Those efforts could be funded in part by a $200,000 grant that ArtsWave and the City of Cincinnati have applied for from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Other potential tools that will be discussed include making the area a special improvement district, which Arlene Koth, Executive Vice President of DCI, will speak to. Beth Robinson, executive director of the Uptown Consortium, will discuss private-public partnerships and techniques her group has used to work with major institutions to benefit their surrounding neighborhoods.
You can learn more and register for this Saturday's session
here.
Writer: Henry Sweets
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