LANCASTER, S.C. — Cutting up construction paper and gluing it to cardstock was likely not what a group of community leaders expected to be doing when they gathered at the Arras Foundation headquarters on Wednesday. By the end of the night, though, the exercise made perfect sense.
“You’ve got to be the glue,” Irene Dumas Tyson, master planner from the Boudreaux group and one of the night’s speakers explained as she told them to make quilt squares.
When everyone was done, she told them to write down three things they want to be true for the future of downtown Lancaster. Fine dining was a popular choice as was the improvement or removal of dilapidated buildings. More businesses, walkability, general beautification, recreational opportunities and construction of an amphitheater were all on the collective wish list of the group. The Arras Foundation has been in on the ground floor of helping jumpstart the downtown revitalization effort since 2017. It was at that point that Lancaster City Administrator Steven Hutfles asked Arras to help the consultants he was going to bid for to do community engagement.
“We were the boots on the ground for, ‘what do people want to see downtown,’ ” said Susan DeVenny, president and CEO of the Arras Foundation. “That’s one of our goals as a foundation. One of our goals is to create open dialogue, to create places and spaces where people can have honest conversations. Being a downtown business, we felt very impressed by his (Hutfles’s) leadership…once that consultant was brought to town, we worked directly with them.”
In 2018 and 2019, Arras gathered the public input for the downtown revitalization plan. That involved collecting more than 3,000 ideas, data points and visions from 1,900 different individuals. Lancaster City Council approved the plan formed in part from those ideas. Devenny said things obviously hit a stall in 2020 (along with everything else) because of the COVID pandemic.
“If you look at the City today, you see that some things from the plan have happened. We have a brand new greenway; it opened during the pandemic. We have a renewed public library; that happened during the pandemic. We have the upfit to the cultural arts center that happened during the pandemic. We have a new park called Mural Park,” said DeVenny.
Wednesday’s gathering took place one day ahead of a planning retreat by the Red Rose City Development Corporation. Alize Thomas works for the City of Lancaster and is executive director of the Corporation. She said the City really got the Corporation going (which had existed, at least on paper for a few years then but was awaiting 501©(3) status and other procedural hurdles) in 2020 to help with revitalize the site of the Springs Mill property. The Corporation receives funding from both the City and from Arras and is working to help “revise and renew downtown” in accordance with the plan adopted in 2020 (which she said was re-upped earlier this year).
“We want to plan first which is why we have this today and tomorrow is to strategic plan for the board so they know what to do in the future. Whether that is take a sledgehammer to a building because we own it, or help out a building owner do that themselves with a grant. It’s just to find different avenues for them to work and help out the community, not just from one entity, but from different ones,” said Thomas, who added that the board is made up of local stakeholders (the makeup of the board is actually set in the Corporations bylaws).
Fred Delk, who has been a successful development corporation director in Columbia and in Union was another speaker for the event. He gave a sort of nuts and bolts picture of what a development corporation does and how one operates. He talked about embracing and working to enact the downtown master plan (which he called “tremendous”), strategic plans and comprehensive plans. Pursuing grants, incentivizing businesses and building owners to improve facades, training, joining professional organization, making connections and seeking professional development and education are all important parts of the equation he said. Also, he said it is important to remember that the Corporation has to carry out its public business like a governmental entity, so agendas must be published for meetings, minutes have to be taken and records have to be kept.
“You have to watch for conflicts of interest. In a Town the size of Lancaster, those are going to happen. Whoever has the conflict just has to recuse themselves and you move on,” he said while noting that the main objective and primary focus always has to remain on steps towards improving downtown.
Several City of Lancaster, Lancaster County and state-level representatives also spoke on a variety of topics specific to their work.
Tyson finished things up by returning to the quilts she had all the participants make. By that time, they had all been attached to a large window and were combined to make one larger quilt. It was just like the evening’s event where the City, Arras, the Corporation and other entities all combined their ideas and effort to make one big, cohesive picture for Lancaster. All it took was everyone coming together…and a little bit of glue.
This article was first published in The Lancaster News.
