VALLEY — Local residents put colored markers to paper drawing their visions of the future revitalization of two closed textile mills, the Langdale Mill and the Riverdale Mill.
Those drawings will be part of the data gathering process in an ongoing, three-day planning charrette, or workshop, to establish a vision for the future redevelopment, help prioritize issues, develop preference for specific design elements and recommendations on an action strategy for the mills.
During an evening community vision workshop at the Valley Community Center, residents were welcomed by Valley Mayor Arnold Leak and heard from representatives of MACTEC Engineering and Consulting Inc. and the Alabama Historical Commission.
“This is not our first design charrette,” Leak said. “We have involved our people in different processes of planning. We have been working with consultants and planners since before the year 2000.”
The mayor told city officials and residents that you can’t try to do it all at once.
“We know the process works,” he said. “When you do a plan it is just like one of those big jigsaw puzzles, you don’t know what piece you are going to grab next. The one thing that is a secret about a small town having a plan is that it is too big of a project to grab the whole thing at once, try to do it all at once, and you know you don’t have the resources.
“Planning allows you to take that little bitty puzzle piece, find where it fits in that puzzle and go ahead and do it while you have it in your hand,” Leak said. “Those little projects lead down toward an end result. That is why we put together a plan. If we have a plan, we will know what we can do with the mills; we will know what parts are valuable and how they fit into the plans for the city.”
The senior designer with MACTEC said everyone was there for a fun, hands-on exercise to help craft the vision for the area of the two mills as well as the whole community.
“We are here because a ‘Brownfield’ grant was applied for and received by the city and part of that grant included the planning charrette,” said Ron Huffman with MACTEC of Atlanta, Ga.
Elizabeth Brown with the Alabama Historical Commission said because the mills are on the National Register of Historic Places doesn’t mean those mills can’t be torn down.
“The city of Valley has two of the three largest buildings on the National Register of Historic Places in Alabama,” she said. “You just don’t find a place the size of Valley that has the quality of the built environment that you have. It is a great legacy that the people who operated the textile mills left for you here.”
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