Putting the pieces together

The city of Medford is moving forward with plans to help grow and revitalize the downtown area.

This is great news and represents a dramatic shift from the era of benign neglect that saw the area diminish from what it once was and could be again. A cityappointed committee, made up of business representatives, community members and elected officials, has been meeting for months to identify areas on which to focus city efforts.

The hope is that by making focused public improvements to the area, this will in turn prompt members of the business community to make renewed private investment in the downtown. The community has already seen this happen with businesses throughout the downtown making improvements to their properties and positioning themselves as destination locations anchoring the historic business district.

With plans for a craft brewery to come to the downtown, as well as extensive renovation of the former Medford Cooperative building into a dining and entertainment venue, the future of the downtown area looks bright. Public investment to enhance and improve downtown spaces to make them more inviting and functional will only accelerate the private efforts.

The challenge for those on the outside looking in is trying to figure out how the pieces fit together. It is like dumping out a box of jigsaw puzzle pieces and being told to put it together without having a picture of what it is supposed to look like as a reference.

By necessity, community rehabilitation will always be a piecemeal process with one piece building on another. As alderman Mike Bub noted at last week’s city council meeting, those involved with the committee have a vision of how everything fits together, but it is also important to share that vision with the community at large. It is important to know that a restroom and stage structure in a downtown parking lot is connected with murals on Main Street buildings and the rehabilitation of the stairs connecting the street to parking areas.

It is only by seeing the bigger picture that community members can decide if public resources are being spent wisely or if greater investment is needed.

Members of the park planning commission need to show the greater community their work and share the vision of what they hope to achieve in helping to reshape the downtown area.

Medford’s downtown has a great deal of potential to be the cultural and civic heart of the community. For this current effort to succeed those involved need to work to share their vision and bring the pieces together for a unified community.