After a committee meeting held on Monday night, Galion City Council is poised to consider legislation at its meeting on Tuesday night that would make substantial alterations to the city’s design review process.
Unfortunately, in so doing, Council would be choosing to leap before it looks and without consideration of the ordinance’s potential impact on access to future funding for the Galion Public Library, Galion Community Theatre, Brownella Cottage, the Big Four Depot, the Gill House, and dozens of other buildings in and around the Uptowne. Importantly, at least two of the properties referred to above have required substantial repair investment in recent years, and other properties in the Uptowne are facing serious structural and repair issues. The entire district is in need of revitalization efforts and focus.
Over the last two decades, when changes were considered for this ordinance, which enables both property owners and the city as a whole to obtain outside funding and tax incentives for renovation projects, proposed revisions were first sent to the Ohio Historic Preservation Office to ensure that the revised ordinance would preserve such access. On Monday night there was no indication that any such homework had been done.
It is indeed possible that OHPO officials would give the green light for these changes in terms of keeping the city and property owners eligible for financial incentives, but leaders are considering action before even taking the first and most obvious step of finding out if that is, in fact, the case. At the committee meeting on Monday, nothing was mentioned ensuring Galion’s eligibility. It is unknown if anyone knows how the process works.
This year, Mansfield is in the middle of multiple projects that are seeing over $40,000,000 in downtown investment, and Shelby has installed a new streetscape, a new downtown park, and a key building is being renovated by the local CIC (think port authority) and that city is now looking at a revolving loan fund for property owners.
In contrast, our city leadership is failing to obtain professional direction in terms of the best way to shepherd Uptowne Galion into the future. In so doing, they are risking much, and Galion could soon be the only city in Crawford and surrounding counties where almost all building owners will have no access to funding or tax incentives.