-by Executive Director Shiloh Todorov

The Third Street project – long a vision of German Village residents, businesses and folks who love and engage the neighborhood regularly – hit a major milestone on Tuesday, March 31.

After 15 years of dreaming, planning, meeting, researching and debating – more than 75 people turned out to a public open house to see what the preliminary engineering study of the corridor shows.

As a quick review – German Village Society won a half-million dollar grant from the City of Columbus in December 2012 to take the results of a 2010 KKG-led study of Third Street, and dig deeper.

OHM Advisors was hired a year ago by the city to lead the preliminary engineering study. Its experts have spent the last year figuring out what it really costs to improve safety, add lighting, fix drainage and flooding issues, flatten sidewalks and restore the aesthetic charm of our main-street equivalent.

As a side note – a lot of great companies in the city could’ve successfully led this project, I’m sure. And GVS had no say about who the city hired. But fortunately, the project lead for OHM – Tony Slanec – lives on Moler. He pushes his baby stroller through the park and down Third Street every weekend. He’s surrounded by the reality of what we need from this project as a neighbor, and you can see that lens applied throughout the study.

The OHM study creates a menu of options and their costs, and now the neighborhood is being asked to come to some consensus about must-haves and can-live-withouts. I am in favor of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good; and I think the menu makes some options pretty clear.

Segment	Option	Option	Option
Curbs	Concrete – $110,000	Natural – $774,000
Street	Brick – $6.2m	Reconstruction Asphalt – $1.2m	Resurfaced Asphalt – $592,000
Utilities	Bury – $15.6m	1-Side Pole – $3.1m	2-Side Poles – $1.8m
Sidewalk	Brick – $1.3m	Concrete – $370,000
Drainage	Single Option – $500,000
Lighting	Historic Post, LED bulb (bluer light) – $598,000	Historic Post, High-Pressure Sodium (yellower light) – $558,000-$558,000

First, Villagers are in love with the annual April bloom created by pear trees. But what about the other 355 days of the year? Here is the real data from the study: fewer than half of Third Street’s trees are pear. MORE THAN HALF of all the trees along the corridor — 59% — are in decline. In addition to creating a falling/breaking/dying hazard, the trees are heaving the sidewalks creating an awful walking condition.

When the Society wrote the application for the half-million dollars in 2012 that led to this study, the option to bury the utilities was already off the table. After MUCH debate, Villagers had collectively decided that buried utilities are neither historic nor cheap. In fact, the meeting where that consensus was finalized was among my first with GVS in December 2011. Here again, data in the study is extremely compelling: Burying utility lines along the whole corridor costs $15.6 million. Cleaning up the lines, by raising the height of NEW poles and disallowing utilities from crossing the street with their lines costs $1.8 million and would provide significant aesthetic improvement.

There is a similar gap in brick streets vs. a redug and newly paved asphalt road. It’s $6.2 million vs. $1.2 million. Add to that a real lack of will – both in elected offices and the departments at the City – to allow new brick streets. And it isn’t for lack of my trying to convince leaders about bricks – they just can’t justify it when tax dollars are stretched so thin. So let’s leave that fight for another day and celebrate our big brick victory last month when the city committed $500,000 to help us repair existing brick streets.

And that raises the next big issue for this project. Funding it. The City project manager who led our meeting Tuesday said Columbus is dedicated to doing a Third Street project. Planners, leaders and elected city officials, including Mayor Coleman’s office, Councilmembers Mills, Paley and Ginther who have taken time to understand our project – want this to move forward. But the neighborhood is going to have to come up with some of the cost – whether through grants, donations, assessments or other means. We have to put some skin in the game to realize these improvements in our front yard.

I will fight for brick sidewalks and natural curbs. We’ve been pushing the city for six months to find us a supply of matching sandstone and no such thing exists – so please get ready for that curb to look different, no matter how we improve it. But the curb pretty much MAKES the project in every other way from improved sidewalks to effective sewer drainage.

We are at the front door of a project made real after thousands of hours and hundreds of people creating the path forward. I hope you’ll take some time to and then participate in the comment period.  Email your ideas – but even if our specific points-of-view aren’t perfectly aligned, it is important to email your SUPPORT for this project – to project manager Matt Lorenz at MALorenz@columbus.gov by April 15.

You can also share a little more with GVS by taking this brief survey.

Comment Sheet – Third Street Open House 3-31-15-FINAL 15 0331_Cost Estimate & Reference Images 15 0331_Public Meeting_FAQ Sheet Open House DRAFT 3-31-15-FINAL-small