A Bright Future Ahead for Montgomery.
The Department of Economic + Community Development at the City of Montgomery has been especially active in community planning work recently! Significant staff efforts have been dedicated to modeling best practices to engage Montgomery’s Midtown neighborhoods through a series of three individual ARPA-funded initiatives for infrastructure and revitalization planning. These three initiatives are the East Fairview Streetscape Master Plan, the Carter Hill Road & College Street Streetscape Master Plan, and the Greater Floyd Campus Master Plan.
To date Montgomery has hosted five large outreach and information meetings; each averaging 50 attendees, with peak participation of over 80 attendees. Economic + Community Development staff have been working for more than a year attending local meetings to present ideas and listen to concerns, sending hundreds of targeted mailings, and taking the time needed to build trust and foster collaboration with the neighborhood associations, businesses and residents.
These intensive engagement efforts have received very positive media coverage from various Montgomery news outlets, which have highlighted every event and helped generate momentum for the projects. The effort the Department of Economic + Community Development has put into these initiatives have genuinely uplifted overall conversations about the importance of walkability, streetscape enhancements, and connectivity to neighborhood development. After each meeting, a 30-day window is provided for additional comments and concerns before progressing to the next phase, strategically scheduling meetings in areas that had already benefited from outreach to maximize engagement and leverage the positive media attention.
To ensure transparency and facilitate ongoing community input, the City has also tested out an innovation of embedding a QR code link into all project flyers. This has been excellent at informing citizens of timeline information, access to comprehensive project data, draft plans, meeting photos, and even fillable survey forms for immediate feedback. This method of communication is hosted on the City of Montgomery’s official city website so that each of the three planning projects can be showcased and updated in one location. Allowing for citizens to follow along in the process through one central hub.
This community centered approach has strengthened resident involvement, increased awareness, and advanced a shared vision for a revitalized Montgomery as Montgomery strives to demonstrate a commitment to innovative and inclusive urban planning. The three draft master plans are already better then they started thanks to the input received during the community engagement process. The Department of Economic + Communty Development expects to present these plants to the Montgomery City Council adoption before the close 2025. Thanks to the hundreds of comments and all this deliberate engagement, these is much anticipation about the bright future of grant applications as the shift now turns to “plan implementation” activities in 2026 and beyond.