CLEVELAND — A community forum happened Monday afternoon in Downtown Cleveland to discuss the future of the North Coast Lakefront Plan.
While the event is now over, Scott Skinner said the conversation is still moving forward.
“Over the next month, we will be in every Ward in the city,” said North Coast Waterfront Development Corporation Executive Director Scott Skinner.
A dream that’s been in the works for a long time is on its way to becoming a reality.
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“The North Coast connector is the enabling infrastructure for everything that we want to do North of the stadium,” said Skinner.
Estimated to cost roughly $460 million in infrastructure and transportation work, Skinner said he’s excited to present the final version of the lakefront masterplan for the land north of the stadium.
But he said there’s just one thing missing.
“If our goal is to make this a place that Clevelanders will feel a sense of ownership of, we need to know what they think beforehand,” said Skinner.
On Monday afternoon, the storm clouds held out for dozens like Gilder Malone to gather on Mall C’s lawn and ask questions.
“Are you creating another entity that doesn’t include people of color?” asked Gilder Malone.
As an avid visitor of Lake Erie and a long-time Westside Cleveland resident, Malone told News 5 she’s afraid people of color will be excluded from this plan as she says she’s seen from other big projects in the past.
“I worry because the more we make things non-inclusive, we start to have people to act out,” said Malone.
“We made sure to work with different neighborhoods to translate our surveys, to really go deeper in certain neighborhoods that we hadn’t gotten enough responses from,” said Cleveland’s Planning Director, Joyce Pan Huang.
Cleveland Planning Director Joyce Pan Huang recognized Cleveland as a majority people of color city, so she said she and her team are working to make sure this project reflects residents like Quinton Green.
“I think the more we include everyone in the city, the more that it creates a better report,” said Green.
Right now, Huang said the master plan is 90% complete.
But there are still other stages that need to be discussed, like the North Coast connector, which will serve as a land bridge that connects Cleveland’s downtown to the waterfront and a new multi-modal transit hub to provide better access to Cleveland’s downtown.
“We’re not successful if the Lakefront is only for a certain set of people,” said Huang.
More community discussions will continue as early as Tuesday at several different 'National Night Out' events throughout the city.
