Plans to better link city’s major assets merit assent

When one considers the most-valuable assets in and around downtown Youngstown, four quickly come to mind:

The medical and health assets of the expansive campus of St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital.

The higher educational assets of Youngstown State University and Eastern Gateway Community College’s Valley Center.

The technological assets of the sprawling campus of the Youngstown Business Incubator and America Makes.

The recreational and entertainment assets of the growing entertainment, restaurant and nightclub scene in the heart of downtown and the region’s mammoth natural gem in Mill Creek MetroParks on the immediate outskirts of the central city.

Individually, each has played a successful role in the ongoing renewal and reinvention of the extended downtown area of the city as the hub of the Mahoning Valley.

Collectively, they bring greater pride, power and prestige to our region’s collective identity. Unfortunately, however, too often, too many fail to view the interconnectedness of these assets, viewing them rather as separate and disparate fiefdoms that coexist with one another amid physical and psychological barriers within a 2-mile radius.

That’s why it’s heartening to see a collective effort to link these resources more cohesively has taken root by a consortium of major stakeholders from each of those close and interrelated sectors of the city.

Those stakeholders include the city government of Youngstown, YSU, EGCC, the Catholic Diocese of Youngstown and the Western Reserve Transit Authority, among others. They have banded together to write and submit an application for a $15 million award from a successful urban renewal program of the U.S. Department of Transportation program called TIGER, the Transportation Infrastructure Generating Economic Recovery Grant.

If the grant is approved this fall, the partners will work to make numerous infrastructure improvements between and among the four major downtown-area institutions, including general cleanup, lane closures to traffic, construction of hiking/biking trails and enhancements to mass-transit services.

“The targeted area is the corridor from Mercy Health to Wick Park and down Fifth Avenue to the Spring Common Bridge,” said Michael Hripko, YSU’s associate vice president for research. “We’re calling it Meds to Eds to Tech to Rec.”

POTENTIAL BENEFITS

“Meds to Eds to Tech to Rec” could pave the way for a variety of benefits. For one, the partners working with cooperative developers could clear lasting vestiges of blight that blotch intermittent segments of the corridor to better continue the growth spurt of residential, business, commercial and other development ongoing in the target area.

Second, the many planned infrastructure improvements would provide tempting opportunities and greater incentives for higher levels of pedestrian traffic and increased use of light mass transit throughout the TIGER zone.

Most importantly, building stronger natural linkages among the downtown vicinity’s most-successful institutions would narrow the psychological distance among them and invite additional development, hustle and bustle.

One need look only 35 miles to the west of Youngstown to see the potential of the TIGER grant program. In the program’s first year in 2009, the city of Kent, partnering with nearby Kent State University, received a $20 million TIGER grant to connect the town center and the university. Today, blight between the two has been cleared, bike and walking paths have been developed and the Kent Central Gateway bus and parking hub has been constructed. As those elements of the TIGER project progressed, about $120 million in private investment followed it, including a new hotel/conference center, office space, retail, restaurants and other development.

If Youngstown’s TIGER project could reap only half the success as Kent’s, it would be well worth the efforts its many partners have invested in its planning. As a path to future advances in the quality of life in Youngstown, we endorse the grant application and urge the U.S. DOT to do likewise.