DREAM plan for Cape due in January

The DREAM Initiative is still alive, even if the governor who gave it life has only two months left in office.

One of the signature programs of Gov. Matt Blunt's administration, the DREAM, or Downtown Revitalization and Economic Assistance for Missouri, Initiative awards money to smaller cities across Missouri for surveys and planning help. The program also puts those cities on a priority list for economic development grants and tax credits.

On Thursday, at the future home of the Children's Museum, 502 Broadway, consultants and their local partners in the DREAM process held an open house to discuss the progress of the program and give some insight into how they are thinking.

So far, Cape Girardeau, one of the first 10 cities included in the program, has received $2.6 million in grants and tax credits. The city is about halfway through the three-year process. Reports on the results of focus groups, land use studies, visitor surveys and market analyses are finished or in the final drafting stages.

The first draft of a comprehensive plan, which brings all the other studies together to present ideas for development, will be presented in January with the final report due in June, said Russell Volmert, a consultant with Peckham, Guyton, Albers & Viets Inc., a St. Louis consulting, planning and architecture firm.

The plan will cover 130 blocks of Cape Girardeau, with three areas of emphasis -- the Broadway corridor, the Mississippi River front and the Good Hope-Haarig district.

"It is our first chance as a community to have a comprehensive downtown plan," said Tim Arbeiter of the Cape Girardeau Area Chamber of Commerce, one of the team members in the local partnership that also includes Old Town Cape and city government.

The comprehensive plan will address how to designate particular areas for emphasis. For example, the region around the Fountain Street extension from Morgan Oak Street to Independence Street is envisioned as an art district with mixed use of residences and shops. A "courthouse village" is included as a likely use for the area just north of the new federal courthouse. And the region behind Cape Girardeau City hall, known as "Happy Hollow," is designated as mixed-use, which could mean anything from commercial and residential development to a new park.

Tom Neumeyer, a photographer who lives on Lorimier Street, after looking over aerial photographs with the potential designations mapped out said he likes what he sees. While he would like to see Happy Hollow become a park, the project should speed private investment in residences along Lorimier Street, he said. Many homes in the area have converted from rental to owner-occupied units, he said.

"It is all positive signs," he said.

The plan won't be all about what to build where. It will suggest ways to make the areas more attractive for shops aimed at students and how to draw new residents to downtown. It will also include recommendations for marketing the city as a tourist destination.

For Greg Williams, who sits on an advisory panel for the Convention and Visitors Bureau, that means cultural tourism and events like the Storytelling Festival, which took place in April and will be an annual event.

"Cultural tourism is the type of tourism that causes people to stay more than one day, for two or three days," he said. That is when the economic multiplier effect "really takes hold."

rkeller@semissourian.com

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