Patrick Hanlon Gives Update on California D.R.E.A.M. Initiative

Members of the California D.R.E.A.M. Initiative Project were present at the signage meeting held Thursday, June 30, at City Hall.
Members of the California D.R.E.A.M. Initiative Project were present at the signage meeting held Thursday, June 30, at City Hall.

Patrick Hanlon, senior project manager for PGAV Planners, who is helping coordinate the California Downtown Revitalization and Economic Assistance for Missouri (D.R.E.A.M.) Initiative gave an update on where the project is at and what to look for going forward.

"Right now we are one year into the project if you look at our contract," Hanlon said. "There has been a little lag as we have been finishing up and helping start and finish other projects. Now we are back at it full force. We have finished our focus groups and are going to be doing phone surveys based on the results of the groups coming in the next month or so. We are also working very hard on the wayfinding component. One thing we would like to have is our retail market analysis which has been held up because we are waiting on the new census data to come out. The new data will be more accurate than the data from the projections coming from the census 10 years ago."

Hanlon and PGAV Landscape Architect Scott Runde attended the signage meeting held Thursday, June 30, at City Hall where they have made progress in terms of getting ideas for locations and designs of wayfinding signs for California. They both plan on attending the next signage meeting to be held July 21, at 7 p.m., once again at City Hall.

"Runde and I drove around after the meeting on June 30," Hanlon said, "and have started working with the wayfinding and design issues along with our building and streetscape design guidelines. They somewhat go hand in hand and that is where we take some block frontages and do some renderings of what the improvements will look like if the facades were cleaned up and restored or rehabilitated to a certain degree. Both are things which get the community excited about the work which will go on with D.R.E.A.M. Wayfinding is an affordable bricks and mortar improvement and the façade improvement is more expensive, but you can look out and see and touch it and it has a great impact on the downtown/uptown areas."

For more of this story check out the July 6 issue of the California Democrat.