Staff Report - Downtown Plan - Laserfiche WebLink

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\.. in this plan address how this downtown area will look and interact with the community, as opposed to strategies relating to economic development for specific businesses. It needs to be understood that the concept plan, if fully developed, would represent a massive expansion of the downtown business area with approximately a four-fold increase in the number of businesses. • Obviously, this report gets caught up in a potential change of direction regarding the bypass. While this is briefly addressed it seems to be more of a casual acknowledgement rather than this may be a reality. As pointed out above, the bypass could provide some funding relief and it opens up some incredible opportunity to further beautify and expand the downtown park area with added walking paths that allow easy pedestrian traversing of the two sides of the business district. Plus the traffic flow would put cars coming through town right next to many of the businesses. It has been maintained from the beginning of the study that the destination downtown concept was independent of the chosen highway alignment. The premise still holds. An update to the text was recently added to acknowledge that there is some cost savings with the alternative alignment since the tunnel would not longer be necessary. The overall concept would not change significantly with an alternative highway alignment. Action:To make a recommendation to the Council to approve the Downtown Plan. City of Pequot Lakes Staff Report 13-3 December 14,2oo6