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Home Page   Local News   Local Sports   Community Calendar   Opinion   Editorials   Columns   Letters to the Editor   Archives   News Archives   Sports Archives	9-06-2007 Be a part of the process A group of Notre Dame urban design graduate students and their professor are going to be in the village through next Tuesday. During their stay, the students will be looking at the growth pressures the community is now facing in the areas of housing, commerce, tourism, parking, sewer and water, community character and aesthetics. Cooperstown, according to Professor Philip Bess, represents good American town design, but is facing pressure from sprawl development. Bess and his students are proponents of a New Urbanism and will looking for ways the village can solve problems it faces without sprawl. The group will be visiting locations and talking to people throughout the village to gather information which will be used in the design process. Tuesday evening, Bess conducted the first public meeting about the project and explained the concept of New Urbanism. He told a group of about three dozen people that he and the students hoped to look at the village through "fresh eyes." The project is similar to the Generic Environmental Impact Statement for the Cooperstown area that was prepared in 2003. That report produced a wealth of information about the area and came with many worthwhile recommendations. This new project can avoid much of the fact finding by making use of the information in the GEIS and should have an interesting New Urbanism slant. The GEIS took many months of meetings to complete. The Notre Dame project has condensed that into an 8-day schedule. Beginning on Thursday, the public is invited to drop in at the village meeting room where the students are working to see an "in-process" presentation and offer suggestions and comments. Those presentations will also be made on Friday, Saturday and Monday afternoons. All the sessions run from from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. in the village meeting room. The process will conclude in a final charrette presentation Tuesday evening from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., also in the village meeting room. In December, the students will return to Cooperstown to present their refined proposal. For a project like this to be successful, it requires the participation of as many people as possible. We urge village residents to take a few minutes to visit with the students to see how the process unfolds and offer your input.
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