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September 8, 2010

Dalton’s future will be topic of college class

Charles Oliver charlesoliver@daltoncitizen.com

Some 40 students from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) will come to Dalton this fall to help city officials find ways to attract young, creative professionals.

“They will be up here Sept. 24 and 25. They’ll be sitting down and talking with City Council members about various possibilities, and they’ll also be driving around and looking at the city,” said City Administrator Ty Ross.

The trip is part of a class the students are taking called “What’s Next for Dalton.” The City Council voted 4-0 on Tuesday to approve an $18,000 contract with the college to conduct the class.

“This is in relation to the City Council’s plans to make Dalton a much more attractive place for young educated people to move back to, to live in and start businesses in,” said Mayor David Pennington.

The class will bring together students from SCAD’s urban design, historic preservation, design management and advertising departments to put together a downtown master plan and city marketing plan.

Ross said the work builds on work done earlier this year by interns from SCAD and from the University of Georgia’s Archway program. Those interns, who spent the summer in Dalton, produced plans for the redevelopment of Crawford Street and the Crown Mill area.

“This will be much broader in scale. The students who were here this summer were landscape architects. The students in this class come from a broader range (of disciplines),” Ross said.

Ross said the students, who have already made one trip to Dalton, will deliver a report to the City Council at the end of the school quarter.

City Council members are already moving ahead on plans for the Crown Mill area, which include a new park. They tabled a contract with American Consulting Professionals to provide environmental assessment of that park at Tuesday’s meeting. Some council members wanted more information on the project. But the council is slated to vote on it at their next meeting on Sept. 20.

The council is holding off for now on the proposals for Crawford Street, which include reducing it from five lanes to two and creating a mall in the center of the street. Some local merchants and property owners have expressed concerns about what those proposals might do to parking.

“The council is still talking to them about their concerns, so they decided to split these projects and go ahead with the Crown Mill ideas,” Ross said.

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