Agency’s director will get work done
When Maurice Taggart turned in his resignation a month and a half ago, he had high praise for his operation’s director, Chandra Griffin. We can see why. Taggart was the executive director of the Urban Renewal Agency, which is powered by Go Forward Pine Bluff and is tasked with shaping up the downtown area and getting rid of blight. Both jobs are significant in terms of what needs to be done.
Taggart, with a new law degree, decided he wanted to open his own practice. But taking over for him was Griffin, who was placed in the top spot as an interim by the agency’s board of directors. And there appears to be no learning curve for her as she has hit the ground, and by that we mean she has thrown herself into the old buildings and the blight with a vengeance.
In a recent interview, she was out with her crew as they were about to demolish the old bingo hall on Chestnut Street, saying getting rid of that eyesore will “move Pine Bluff one step closer to making the proposal for downtown market-rate housing happen.”
On numerous occasions, the members of the agency’s board would chafe at the unavoidable slowness that some projects were moving. Griffin, like Taggart, is also irritated by the same things.
“There are several ongoing projects, and these things take time,” she told a reporter. “There’s a time frame for each project that we are dealing with, and the challenge I have personally is the pace.”
Griffin knows her way around. She was hired to be Taggart’s executive assistant, but he said he knew she was overqualified for that job. As she describes herself, she’s a get-it-done type person. She’s a real estate professional and has worked in city government and retail management, seemingly a perfect mix for what she faces. Not surprisingly, she became Taggart’s go-to person.
At a meeting this week, she said she was working with an architecture firm that is analyzing 10 downtown buildings. The firm will help her figure out which ones are structurally sound, which ones can be restored and what the cost of the restoration would be on a per-square-foot basis.
That information will be crucial in determining what can and should be saved and what is too far gone. It should be common knowledge by now, but the reason downtown looks so much better and is so much safer than it once was is because of the efforts of the Urban Renewal Agency and Go Forward Pine Bluff.
They are on the right track in revitalizing Pine Bluff, and the agency would appear to be on the right track with Griffin. We would not be surprised if, in a few months, the interim label in her title disappears.