Community Engagement Via Post-It Notes: ASU @ Mesa City Center

26 April 2019

Community Engagement Via Post-It Notes: ASU @ Mesa City Center

These were some of the faces sitting at the back of The Saguaro Room in the Main Mesa Public Library on Wednesday, April 24th for a Community Design Workshop hosted by RAIL Mesa and ASU.

The Design Building Team was there, including Diane Jacobs from Holly Street Studios who's working with San Francisco-based Architects Bohlin Cywinski Jackson.
Rick Naibor [spelling?], who said he has been working with Jeff McVay, the City of Mesa's Director of Downtown Transformation, for more than three years, made the introductions and gathered written comments on post-it notes to gather ideas and feedback from those who responded to a set of questions.Rick said he had worked for the City of Phoenix for 36 years. He's been working at ASU since 2014.

The workshop was well-attended with members of the public and employees of both the City of Mesa and ASU.
< Here's an image of RAIL Mesa's David Crummey starting off what ended to be a very inter-active exchange of ideas for a Developer and Lease Agreement by city officials and ASU for the new construction of one building at the NWC of Pepper Place/Centennial Drive in the parking lot behind the old 1970's-era vacant city-owned IT Building on First Avenue. From plans and timelines presented, it is way more than that to somehow create "Mesa City Center"

WHAT'S YOUR VISION OF THIS GRID?
Here's a scale model with Mesa Arts Center at the top on the south side of Main Street.
N Center Street is to the right. Centennial Drive to the left.
Notice at the top that the International Design Award-Winning MAC is on a different diagonal axis. None, absolutely none of the buildings in the area under review can match the high architectural standards set by the $100-million arts center that opened in 2005. The 8-story City Hall is the ugliest building in the entire downtown. Most of the others are one-story hangovers from The 1970's-Era. The empty spaces are parking lots used by city employees or city utilities and development services customers.

An ASU "satellite campus" downtown was a controversial issue in 2016 and 2018. Mesa taxpayers REJECTED it first, and then approved a scaled-down version to fund one new building - the image to the left is what was used by city officials and mainstream media over-and-again to make the sales-pitch.
< It is not and probably never was city officials had in mind, because they simply didn't know, but needed something to hoodwink taxpayers.

So it's back to the drawing boards - what you see is the site on Pepper Place.
Readers of this blog may want to get in touch with David Crummey at RAIL MESA