Officials to review comprehensive plan for city
COHOES, N.Y. » City officials are excited to be closer to completing and adopting a new comprehensive plan for the city to follow into the future.
Earlier in the year, city officials held numerous meetings for stakeholders, business owners, organizations, residents and visitors to give input into the city’s new comprehensive plan. The city hasn’t adopted a new comprehensive since Cohoes 2000 was adopted in 1992 and updated a few times since its approval.
Once Mayor Shawn Morse knew that his administration wanted to create a new comprehensive plan, the city enlisted in the Laberge Group of Albany for engineering planning consultant help. The group has been working with city officials and stakeholders for several months and during the Common Council’s recent council workshop, Nicole Allen from the Laberge Group updated the council with a brief presentation on the plan.
“She gave a presentation at the public workshop Tuesday night that laid out what the comprehensive plan was and what was compiled and what it all meant,” explained Morse. “The council will now have a couple weeks to digest it all and then vote on the adoption of it during our regular August meeting.”
“It was more of an overview of the entire process, I talked a little bit about how the plan was formulated, it’s kind of the background documents leading into how it was developed using the prior goals and strategies and older plans to kind of make sure that were vetted through the current process with the public and then reaffirming what are the values for Cohoes,” added Allen, a planning services manager with Laberge Group. “From there we devel-
oped the final recommendations and incorporated it into three main categories for Cohoes, which was the social, the environmental and the economic pillars to be able to really identify a plan that would reflect quality of life actions for Cohoes.”
According to a full draft of the comprehensive plan published on the city’s website in June, the new plan will be called ‘ the 2017 Cohoes Proud Comprehensive Plan’ and the drafted plan is a 217 page document.
“The comprehensive plan was something that is very important to me as the mayor, so that we could lay out what our future blueprint was to get to an All-America City,” said Morse. “We wanted it to be a blueprint of our community and not just a political document, so we had many, many open meetings with all types of different stakeholders.”
Allen said there are a lot of recommendations that all focus on smart growth ideas within each of the three categories mentioned earlier.
“There are recommendations for different areas citywide,” said Allen. “There are recommendations for downtown, there are recommendations for the waterfront and making sure there’s public access to the river, and then also looking at holistically, the housing recommendations and the seniors and youth as well, so it’s definitely comprehensive in nature.”
Allen went on to mention another recommendation for the downtown area, which would be to have “complete streets”.
“They’re really looking to continue that effort to make complete streets that are bicycle and pedestrian friendly; Remsen Street is being proposed for the entire length to have a com- plete street network and then continuing that as a model for the rest of the streets in the city,” said Allen.
Common Council President Christopher Briggs said he believed the presentation and the process with the community involvement has been good and that it should help to continue to improve the city into the future.
“I think it was tremendous process since many people were able to give their opinions,” said Briggs. “The comprehensive plan is a living, breathing document, it’s kind of a blueprint but it can change as our circumstances change.”
City officials said that they intend to apply for as many grants as possible to help to be able to do all of these types of recommendations at a faster and cheaper rate.
“Any grant that’s out there, we’re taking the opportunity to apply for it,” said Morse. “One of the more exciting things is that maybe in the past we didn’t have the ability to apply for all these grants, we didn’t have ability to be in the game and if you’re not in the game then you really end up sitting on the sidelines. Now we have the ability to apply for a lot of these grants, although our staffing levels really don’t allow us to just be focused on grant, grant, grant writing because we’re a small city, our staff led by Economic Development Director Mike Jacobson have done an outstanding job applying for all of these grants. But it’s a lot of work and it takes a lot of time and there’s no guarantee, but with the grants things get done quicker, without the grants, are goal is the same to move our city forward, but it would take a lot more willpower and it would be a slower process.”
To view the full 2017 Cohoes Proud Comprehensive Plan, got to the city’s website at cohoes.com.