P’ville’s Scherer to Participate in National Planning Conference
The Village of Pleasantville will receive some valuable and very affordable help in updating its master plan this fall from the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA).
Mayor Peter Scherer will attend the Mayors’ Institute on City Design in Miami Beach in late September, one of several annual conferences the organization holds. This year Scherer was invited to attend its East Coast event.
The conference, to be held at Florida International University, is a chance for officials to receive guidance in public planning from highly skilled professionals in related fields.
“Mayors from places around the East each come with a design problem,” Scherer said. “They make a presentation about that design problem and then the other seven mayors, a panel of eight design professionals and real estate professionals, as well as people from the NEA and the American Conference of Mayors and American Architectural Foundation work on them over the course of this three-day program.”
Making the trip even better is that it’s being paid for by the NEA.
Scherer said he wanted to explore some of the ideas he raised during the master plan brainstorming session the village held in June.
“The notion of transit-oriented development and a mix of uses as well as the parking and circulation problems we have here, that certainly feels like the realm we should be in,” he said.
Pleasantville’s master plan was last updated in 1995. Village officials have hired BFJ Planning to assist them with revisions aimed at increasing commerce and mixed-use development downtown while addressing issues such as lack of parking and walkability.
Several residents who attended the June meeting said they wanted to see the village’s traffic calmed and more diverse housing stock to accommodate seniors and millennials, who are increasingly choosing to live in walkable communities near mass transit.
A presentation on the master plan update was scheduled for last night’s (Monday) work session.
Another benefit of the conference is the guidance from Florida International University’s faculty, Scherer said.
“They have an architecture school as well as a planning department and part of the stipend they get from the NEA to manage this involves visiting each of the eight communities,” Scherer said. “So someone will come here and assist us in thinking about how to (proceed) from what we want to bring to the event.”
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