By Ashley Toland Editor

A great big plan for tomorrow

Get ready! I am about to unveil my plan for my plan to write a column on the “New Plan for Mobile.”

I am not certain how I am going to implement said “plan,” and I really don’t care about that part. All I know is my “plan” is going to contain loads of Google Earth images, and I am going to repeatedly employ the use of the following words: “infill,” “commercial corridor,” “relocation,” “clusters,” “mixed use,” “sprawl,” “preservation,” “conservation,” “redevelopment,” “new construction,” and the sentence, “now we haven’t actually talked to them about moving this yet.”

I’m also going to make very “ambitious” recommendations that have very little chance of ever happening, while also advocating projects that are so common sense and have been talked about for so long that you will just want to scream “Duh!”

And then I’m going to charge you $400,000 for this.

My plan rocks!

Wait, I’m sorry – that’s not my plan for my column on the “New Plan,” that is the “New Plan for Mobile,” which was unveiled last week at the Mobile Civic Center Theatre (which incidentally will be changed under the “New Plan” to be part of some sort of Disneyesque retail/residential/entertainment development – that is, if some random developer is found who is willing to implement this plan within the plan).

The “plan” also includes the following plans>

• To put a boat slip at the end of Dauphin Street, which would offer lovely dinner cruises or be the home to a water taxi service. (Um, did anyone happen to notice all the trains, cranes, and industrial water-mobiles down there?)

• To put a culinary or performing arts school in Barton Academy. (Or we could also contact NASA to put an astronaut school there as well.)

• To make the Alabama Department of Transportation tear down the on-ramps from Water Street to I-10 and the Wallace Tunnel to make more room for more retail and residential in Fort Conde Village. (I feel quite certain that will be one of ALDOT’s top priorities.)

• To bring stores, like a Whole Foods grocery store, to various intersections in town, like Spring Hill and Broad. (Thankfully, the U-Haul center that has been there for a million years should have access to plenty of moving vans, though there is no doubt they will break down on the way to their new location.)

• To relocate the downtown post office to make room for some sort of park, which will include a traffic circle (think “National Lampoon’s “European Vacation” – “Big Ben, Parliament!” Now, I know the federal government is big on spending money on bizarre research studies and other pork projects, but moving post offices? Hmmm?)

• I swear they said something about relocating the new container terminal. Rob Holbert heard it too, but neither of us still believe they could have actually suggested moving the $300-million dollar terminal, which they just finished pouring about 300 billion yards of concrete into. I’m sure that relocation will be a cinch!

• Bike trails. (Good Lord, if we had every dime that we have spent on all of the studies that have told us we need more bike trails, we could probably actually have some bike trails.)

• We need downtown condos, mixed use retail and residential, parking garages and for some of the old parking lots to be resurfaced. (Gee, why didn’t we ever think of that?)

• Various other “ambitious” (i.e., never going to happen) and “attainable” (i.e., definitely could have come up with these ourselves) goals. You can view these at www.newmobileplan.com.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t mean to be snarky. Well, I kind of do. I definitely think we need to make plans for the future – absolutely. But it’s just that some of these seem so pie-in-the-sky, they are just ridiculous. The planners would say, “Well, smarty pants, this is not all supposed to be executed tomorrow, these are ‘long term’ goals.” Well, how do we know if any of these “long term” goals will even fit into Mobile’s landscape in 10 or 15 years?

Also, I sit at city council every week and listen to Fred Richardson bemoan the fact he can’t get enough capital money to fill up 40 something ditches in Trinity Gardens (this has been his rant for years), and Connie Hudson say if she can’t get her capital needs met in WeMo, there could be dangerous intersections and such.

So you see what I’m saying, it’s kind of difficult to listen to these kinds of plans when we are constantly told how broke we are and we need to annex all of these new areas into the city or else we are sho-nuff going to be broke as a joke.

Did the planners take our current economic state – both locally and nationally – into account? Or was it just like “let’s pretend we have all the money in the world, what would we do then?”

That’s sure what it seems like, and that’s just crazy.

I would have much rather have been presented a list of achievable goals, with realistic plans to implement each of them in phases.

I don’t know about ya’ll but I’d rather have one mile of an actual bike trail, than a thousand pages saying how we need a thousand miles of them.

Ashley Toland is Lagniappe editor. Contact her at ashleytoland@lagniappemobile.com.

Archives