Proposed implementations stemming from a joint land use study will be presented to the public Thursday.
The meeting, to be held at Caledonia Town Hall at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, is an opportunity for the public to see the proposals of the joint land use study implementation plan and to ask questions of the project staff.
A JLUS is paid for via the Department of Defense’s Office of Economic Adjustment. They are conducted in military base towns to assess the relationship between the base and other local entities. The study is a collaborative planning effort on land use between the Golden Triangle Development LINK, the Columbus Air Force Base, Lowndes County, the city of Columbus and other area agencies.
The CAFB study began in 2011, when the department of defense provided a grant of $213,800 to conduct the study. This is the first such study conducted around CAFB, though they are common practice in base towns. Recent regional growth played a big part in the federal government’s decision to fund the study, according to grant manager Mary Cates Williams.
“They approached CAFB because they thought with all the economic development in the Golden Triangle it would be an ideal candidate,” Williams said.
The main finding of the study was that someone with planning experience was needed to review all land around the base that could be utilized for economic development, but work collaboratively with CAFB and the surrounding community to ensure nothing is done that would compromise any of the base’s activities.
A second grant of $227,000 was awarded in 2013 by the federal government to come up with an implementation plan.
Williams said the local JLUS team took bids from consulting groups to find the best implementers. Matrix Design Group, the same contractors chosen to conduct the initial study, received $160,240 from the department of defense to come up with an implementation plan.
Matrix’s project consultants will be on hand Thursday to present the strategies they feel deserve the most consideration to be implemented. Ultimately, it is up to the base, the county, the city and the LINK to decide to go forward with the implementations. These are recommendations local entities can chose to implement.
“What this process provides is a toolkit,” said Matthew Davis, a Matrix project consultant. “It’s a menu of potential options that they can pursue individually or collectively.”
According to project consultants, the main focus of the implementation plan will be to create more formal communications between the base and local entities to ensure all growth in the area works smoothly with the local base.
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