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The Work Plan: Overview
It will be a great Downtown when every project is measured against the strategic plan prior to approval.
The Queen City Hub forms the basis for the implementation of the Vision for Downtown described in Volume 1. The Action Plan systematically identifies action items in four activity areas (Living, Working, Visiting and Shopping), and five principles. The activity areas should be delivered in accordance with the principles of Access, Energy and the Environment, Urban Design and Management, Preservation, and Image.
Within each of the four activity and five principle areas, action items are further broken down by classification (Policy, Analysis, and Implementation) and time frame (short-, medium- and long-term). The long-term outlook is defined as three to five years, though some aspects of implementation may span 8-10 years. While that time frame is long, it does not mean that the work can wait. On the contrary, it is imperative to act now to create neighborhoods Downtown and complete investments in strategic areas in order to establish Downtown as the regional center for all of Western New York.
The Mayor’s Office of Strategic Planning will identify agency team leaders for each of the nine activity and principle areas and coordinate relationships among them. The lead positions may shift as the work progresses based on different project requirements, priorities and circumstances. Team leaders in the activity and principle areas will work to refine and complete the work tasks and account for the progress of the work.
Four Activities
A major focus of the vision is to create a Downtown where people live, work and play. Towards that end, the work tasks in activity areas relate directly to:
Living Downtown
Living Downtown: building diverse and mixed-use neighborhoods Downtown that interconnect strategic investment areas and the inner ring of neighborhoods. An important part of living Downtown is the ability to shop Downtown, meeting retail demand for new residential populations as well as the Downtown worker population.
Working Downtown
Working Downtown: retaining existing jobs and adding new jobs in all five strategic investment areas by stressing our regional role as the upstate center for government, finance, insurance, real estate, law and life sciences. To this we add the development of a Downtown education campus building on the strength of the Erie Community College and library and a new public safety campus.
Visiting Downtown
Visiting Downtown: supporting diverse venues for the broad cross section of visitors to Downtown with further investments in venues like hotel and conference accommodations. Visiting Downtown requires improved signage, “wayfinding“ and interpretation of significant attractions Downtown, making them visitor friendly with a full complement of amenities. It also requires both better marketing and coordination of “visitor ready“ attractions as well as better product development for those visitor attractions that are not yet available.
Shopping Downtown
Shopping Downtown: creating an environment that invites small businesses to fill vacant or underutilized ground floor space. Shopping Downtown needs a competitive mix of goods that cater to Downtown workers, visitors, new Downtown residents, and residents of the inner ring of neighborhoods.
Five Principles
Each of the four activity programs should be implemented in accordance with five key principles for Downtown: access, urban design and management, preservation, energy and green design, and image.
Accessing Downtown
Accessing Downtown: making the Downtown Hub easy to understand and user friendly with fully integrated pedestrian, bike, car, bus and rail services. It must be an access system that is well connected to the neighborhoods and the waterfront while it supports all the activities Downtown.
Urban Design and Management
Urban Design and Management Downtown: creating a quality pedestrian environment; one that is both beautiful and urban.
Preservation
Preservation Downtown: assuring the preservation of historically significant buildings and related urban fabric and districts. A preservation approach designed to use history as a significant economic development tool, balancing a reasonable demolition policy with building re-use and restoration.
Energy and Green Design
Energy and Green Design Downtown: achieving energy efficiencies and related cost savings, improving our ecology with sustainable design, and adding to the quality of life in Downtown.
Image
Image Downtown: representing an accurate picture of Downtown, its current life and future potential.
How to Read the Activity and Principle Work Plans
Following a brief introduction and the goals for the work plan, each theme area provides three choices from a horizontal menu. The first, "Context", includes a problem statement for that particular topic, a current strategy summary, and strategies which are proposed to address the problems. The second, "Action Items", cover the short- and long-term policy, analysis, and implementation of the plan. The last, "In Brief", includes a snapshot of the current state of the issue in downtown (number of housing units, major employers, parking spaces, number of visitors, etc.), measures of success (baseline indicators), rules (guiding principles) that should govern action on the topic, and work-to-date in the topic area.
Each topic also has a "Work Chart" (located at the end of the In Brief section) that tentatively identifies participants according to tasks. Click the small chart image to link to a larger, legible version. The charts are based on the work of the focus groups that initially developed the tasks and have been reviewed by the agencies participating in the Downtown Buffalo 2002! Action Team and Implementation Council. Many other participants could add value to the tasks at hand and the tasks could also be performed with less extensive multi-party collaborations. The initial designation of participants is meant as a place to start in building action teams required to get the task completed; it is not the final word.
All of the participants in plan implementation are grouped according to their status as public, not-for-profit (NGO), or private agencies. Within the public sector, the City of Buffalo refers to a broad range of potential participants including the Department of Public Works, the Office of Strategic Planning, The Buffalo Economic Renaissance Corporation, the Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency, the Common Council, and the Preservation Board. The Mayor’s Office of Strategic Planning will coordinate City Hall participants.
All of the tasks are given two priority numbers in the charts to give action teams a sense of the relative importance assigned the work by the participants in a Downtown Buffalo 2002! webbased survey of the draft plan issued in April of 2002. The first number indicates the importance of the task within the prescribed short-, medium-, and long-term time frame. The second number identifies the importance of the task relative to all the tasks in the theme area. Some items in the charts have a “B“ rather than a number to identify a basic requirement needed to implement the vision of the The Queen City Hub. Other items have an "NR" indicating not ranked. Those items not ranked were derived from plan review and were not part of the survey.
