LEWISTON – City leaders and community activists hope they can plot a future for a Lewiston neighborhood this morning.
City officials and neighbors are scheduled to meet beginning at 8:30 a.m. today at the Lewiston Multi-Purpose Center to discuss the future of the area east of Lewiston’s downtown.
The meeting is open to the public.
Frank O’Hara, a planning consultant for Planning Decisions, will moderate the meeting. Lincoln Jeffers, assistant community development director, said he and other city staffers would be on hand, but they’d stay in the background.
“We’re there to listen, not to talk,” Jeffers said. “Our goal is to find out what people want to happen in that neighborhood.”
Results of the meeting will be used to draft a five-year plan that shows how the city will spend federal block grant money through 2009. The first draft of the plan is due Feb. 8.
Neighbors and community activists began getting involved last summer, after the city unveiled the Heritage Initiative. That is a 10-year conceptual plan aimed at cleaning up the city’s poorest, most crowded neighborhoods by replacing rundown tenement buildings with townhouses, parks and a boulevard.
Some residents accused city officials of wanting to force poor people out of the downtown.
Neighborhood people and social service representatives, calling themselves the Visible Communtiy, began meeting in August. They sponsored four community meetings last fall and they plan to continue working with neighbors and the city.
The group held a demonstration Thursday afternoon on Knox Street. Members brought brooms and shovels to the demonstration to metaphorically clear a path from the neighborhood to the Multi-Purpose Center and to show that they were willing to work with the city.
The group objects to a proposed boulevard connecting Locust Street with Bartlett Street and plans to tear down some old buildings.
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