A team of experts from around the country gave their time and attention to the city of Piqua last week, according to Bill Lutz, development program manager.

"While the product of their work (a guide for future development in the Historic East Piqua Neighborhood) is not quite finished," wrote Lutz. "The process itself is what is distinguishing this project as something truly innovative for the community."

Last year, the community received a grant from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR). The ATSDR agency is housed in the Center for Disease Control and has a very small brownfield program that has traditionally funded public health authorities to do projects such as property inventories. ATSDR provided this grant due to a proposed innovative endoverment with Piqua the first municipal government to receive funding from ATSDR.

"When we received the grant, we immediately worked with the National Brownfield Association out of Chicago to implement a project where a team of experts would come to town and provide us with a development plan for a specific neighborhood," continued Lutz. The National Brownfield Association had experience with this type of process, but in much larger cities such as Flint, Michigan, Portland, Oregon and Chicago. "This was the first time this type of activity was going to take place in a small city."

Earlier this year, the City chose Burgess and Niple, Inc. to help manage the project along with the National Brownfield Association.

"Together, with our input we developed [a] team to look at our particular neighborhood," said Lutz.

This team was assembled to develop a plan in a quick period of time. The framework of this process comes from the book Blink. In Blink, the author Marcus Gladwell theorizes that many times better decisions can be made in a "blink of an eye" rather than long periods of thought; through experiences, individuals have unconsciously developed ways to recognize patterns and have learned what these patterns mean.

Bringing in this team of experts to take a quick look at the community, they are drawing upon their experiences as they relay their own pattern recognitions, says Lutz.

Guests and city staff spent a two hour bus tour of the community with special emphasis on the target area.

Lutz noted these individuals were very complimentary of the community and were all impressed with the city's wonderful natural assets and on the whole, very clean and presentable.

"Granted, they understood that there were weak areas and strong areas of the town, on balance, they felt that there much more positives about the community than negatives. The following day, these individuals spent about six hours in our conference room using their experience to come up with a development plan for our target neighborhood."

While these plans and concepts, said Lutz, are still in a very draft format, the work that they were able to develop in six hours was certainly different than what was expected. "It has a more natural, recreational feel than anything commercial or industrial. It was also clear that from the beginning of the six hour project, the team was very interested in pursuing a commercial/industrial end use, but the conversation changed during their deliberations."

According to Lutz, Robert Colangelo, team leader, stated the group is very conscious of the steady population of the community and any new development could run the risk of not being absorbed by the community and be a negative in the long run.

Burgess and Niple, Inc. is developing a final report that will outline the final recommendations and implementation for the area with the public to be familiarized with the product and given a chance to comment.

For more information contact William Lutz, Development Program Manager at 937.778.2062 or blutz@piquaoh.org.