Reinventing Youngstown gets a well-earned boost

The power of persistence and partnerships paid off prodigiously for Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley this week.

On Tuesday, Elaine L. Chao, secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, formally announced in Washington that a consortium of Valley institutions will be awarded a $10.85 million infrastructure improvement grant from the Better Utiliizing Investments to Leverage Development [BUILD] program.

The significance of that award cannot be overstated. The Youngstown proposal stands out as the one and only urban BUILD application among many from Ohio that received funding in the program this year. It also stands out as among only 91 projects to get the green light out of 851 applicants seeking $10.9 billion nationwide.

The top-tier quality of the Youngstown proposal drew special attention from Chao and other U.S. DOT brass as the only federal BUILD grant recipient to receive a special invite to attend Tuesday’s official announcement ceremony. Youngstown Mayor Jamael Tito Brown was among the honored attendees.

From our perspective, however, we’ve known for several years now that the project proposal stood out with singular supremacy. Essentially the same project had sought DOT funding each year since 2016 but missed the cut by a hair each time. This year’s proposal, with some added tinkering, clearly stood out as having all the right stuff.

First, elements of the city’s SMART2 [Strategic & Sustainable, Medical & Manufacturing, Academic & Arts, Residential & Recreational, Technology & Training] proposal fully meet the principal criteria for BUILD funding. The major elements of SMART2 focus squarely on road and public transportation improvements. The total $26.2 million project to renovate and modernize downtown Youngstown and the Fifth Avenue corridor does just that.

The grant proposal calls for putting Fifth Avenue on a so-called “road diet,’ reducing it from six lanes to a divided boulevard with a landscaped median and one traffic lane on each side.

Other major structural and aesthetic enhancements are planned for major downtown streets including Federal, Commerce, Phelps and Front.

New to this year’s grant is a component that strengthens the all-important public-transportation dimension. It calls for activating autonomous driverless shuttle vehicles to connect the Mercy Health medical campus, Youngstown State University, the downtown central business district and the new chill-can plant and research campus operated by Joseph Co. International on the city’s East Side.

In those and other respects, the proposal meets and beats the areas under evaluation. They include safety, economic competitiveness, quality of life, environmental protection, energy independence, innovation and community partnerships.

SYNERGY AT WORK

The cohesive strength of the Youngstown partnerships likely sealed the deal for this week’s award. As Jim Kinnick, executive director of the Eastgate Regional Council of Governments, put it, “This grant will help us to capitalize on the synergy in our urban core.”

We’re confident that synergy – the state in which two or more entities work together in a fruitful way to produce an effect greater than the sum of their individual effects – will be profound.

After all, the heavyweight partners of COG, Youngstown city government, Youngstown State University, Mercy Health and the Western Reserve Transit Authority worked assiduously to craft, fine-tune and revise the $26.2 million municipal makeover blueprint.

Now that the BUILD grant dollars are at hand and local matching funds and services are nearly in place, we are confident the project will meet or exceed its lofty expectations.

According to U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan of Howland, D-13th, who along with other members of the Valley’s congressional delegation lobbied vigilantly for grant approval, the SMART2 project will support more than $250 million in additional economic development in our region.

“This $10.8 million federal investment will prove to be truly transformative for the city of Youngstown and the entire region,” Ryan said.

Toward that desired end, we urge the partners to finalize its phase-by-phase planning for the project toward a groundbreaking on Phase 1 next year.

The central-city project will only complement pumped-up neighborhood revitalization progress on all sides of the city. Indeed those efforts also recently drew national acclaim. The Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp. earlier this fall received the first-place award from the U.S. Conference of Mayors for neighborhood-redevelopment achievement.

Collectively, the supercharged efforts to reinvent the downtown corridor and to re-energize city neighborhoods can go far toward polishing Youngstown’s image and building business and residential growth for years and decades to come.