Work begins on comprehensive plan for city
A small but enthusiastic group of Demopolis residents gathered at Rooster Hall Thursday, June 13, to learn about their city and come up with ways to improve life in the community.
The hopeful result is being called Demopolis in Action.
Bryan King, community planner with the engineering firm Goodwyn, Mills and Cawood, has spent the past several months collecting data on Demopolis and coming up with some of its opportunities and challenges. What he presented in his Community Analysis Draft was the first phase of the project.
Phase two began Thursday with an introduction to some statistics that those in the meeting found troubling, such as a population decline of 7.2 percent between 2000 and 2017, a poverty rate of 28.2 percent and 57 percent of the buildings in the downtown area that are vacant.
The meeting was supposed to last an hour, but ideas and opinions flowed among those taking part, and many stayed past the official end to talk more.
During the meeting, they proposed problems, solutions and achievable goals as part of developing a comprehensive plan that can transform Demopolis. The objective of the plan, King said, is to define short and long-term goals and provide a guidebook for the city’s leaders on how to achieve those goals.
But, he stressed, the plan is “not worth the paper it’s printed on if it doesn’t turn into action.”
King said the group faces challenges. “Making a community a better place is not an easy thing to do,” he said, “but if done right, the planning process plays for itself.”
He had the audience focus on three aspects of Demopolis: people, prosperity and place. King asked participants to take home and share the Community Analysis Draft and encourage others to provide their own input.
“The more people we can inform about our community, the better,” he stressed.
King said he hopes to reach out to other community stakeholders over the next several months to get more input. Once the ideas are compiled, citizens again will be asked to meet for the third phase of the process, to develop formal goals, action plans and an implementation strategy.
The fourth and final state is to adopt the plan and begin work, he said.
Those interested in sharing their ideas is asked to contact King at bryan.king@gmcnetwork.com