City sets dates for November Planning sessions

Three days coming up later this month will mark the opportunity for residents of Prince Rupert to share their thoughts on the what the future of Third Avenue West, Seal Cove and the city owned waterfront properties may look like in the future.

November 21, 23 and 24 are the dates set aside by the City of Prince Rupert, Redesign Rupert and the Planning Partnership for consultation with the public on planning initiatives for those three key areas of interest, with all sessions taking place at Northwest Community College.

The First session on Monday the 21st will serve as the introduction to the project, as urban designers from the Planning Partnership an Ontario based organization that is working with the City and Redesign Rupert outline the scope of their involvement and what they hope to achieve through the community engagement sessions.

To get the conversation rolling, they will provide a look at what other communities have done to change the nature of their public areas and downtown core and receive the thoughts from the community as far as what kind of change is desired in Prince Rupert.

The November 21st session at NWCC starts at 7PM.

In addition to the opening session, the design team from the The Planning Partnership will be meeting with local stakeholders in town during the course of their stay, conducting meetings and collecting general feedback on what local residents and business owners might wish to see when it comes to any redevelopment of the three areas of interest.

From those consultations the design team will then begin their work on developing some concepts, taking the suggestions and observations from the public, with the community invited to drop in at NWCC on Wednesday, November 23rd from 6:30 to 7:30 to view the early results and once again offer up some guidance on themes of development.

Thursday the 24th marks the night for the Final Presentation, a three hour event from 4 until 7 PM where the design team will reveal what they have taken from the public consultation and deliver the design concepts that they have created for the public to review.

From that work, the ambition for the City is to see the sessions inspire the community and lay the groundwork towards a common design and approach to development for the areas where the city is directing its focus.

The Prince Rupert Campus of Northwest Community College on Fifth Street
will be the host venue for three days of planning sessions as the City joins with
Redesign Rupert and The Planning Partnership to review options for the community

The first notification of the planning sessions came in October when City Council heard a short review from the Mayor as to what the city hoped to achieve from their work with the Planning Partnership group.

You can review those notes from our blog item of October 12.

To get a bit of a preview of the kind of design options you might see as guidelines for the Prince Rupert sessions, see the Planning Partnership website here. They provide a fairly thorough overview of some of the projects that they have worked on in recent years in a number of communities across the nation.

You can learn more about the Redesign Rupert initiative from their website and Facebook page.

Notes on items of interest from Prince Rupert City Council can be reviewed on our Council Discussion Archive page.