YOUNGSTOWN — Officials noted that active residents, long-term local businesses, community history and heritage are among the assets that the 4.7-mile stretch of Belmont Avenue in Youngstown and Liberty provides to the area.

The assets were part of the feedback officials received from shareholders. They shared it on Thursday, as the city of Youngstown and Liberty Township hosted a public open house at the Jewish Community Center to release the findings from the Build a Better Belmont strategic plan.

Sharon Letson, Youngstown CityScape’s executive director, said they heard some of the challenges the corridor faced — namely speeding traffic and lack of code enforcement, noting improved lighting to be “critical.”

Among other challenges were the missing sidewalks at Tod Cemetery, lack of maintenance, unpredictable driving patterns and a history of disinvestment, which helped create perceptions that Belmont Avenue was an unsafe place.

“I think the stakeholder meetings revealed both practical concerns and aspirational visions for the corridor,” Letson said. “The recollections that we heard about the history of the corridor provided important context for current vitalization efforts, suggesting that residents measure potential improvements against their memories of the corridor’s form of vitality.”

Letson said people mostly noted that they did not see a line between Mahoning and Trumbull counties — only seeing it as a collective Belmont Avenue.

THE NEXT STEPS

Katie Philips, an MS Consultants urban planner and project manager for the Belmont Avenue corridor plan, which was funded in July after Youngstown paid $140,000 to create the plan, said the groups were focused solely on the corridor — which runs from downtown Youngstown to Churchill Plaza in Liberty.

In March, Youngstown received $200,000 from the state’s Appalachian Regional Commission Community Grant Program, using money from the federal American Rescue Plan, for the Belmont Avenue plan.

Philips said they hope to have a phased action plan, which focuses on priorities for the corridor.

She shared examples of improvements their group already has begun to look at, as well as things that they’re planning to get residents’ feelings about to make Belmont Avenue more pedestrian-friendly in their interactions with vehicles.

“Examples of different bike paths — because we might say, ‘oh, we want to feel more comfortable on a bike.’ There are five different ways to implement that,” Philips said. “You can bike right on the road; you could add a separate track for the bike. You can get them totally off the road and give them their own path, right? There are multiple different options for these types of things.”

After hearing that feedback, it’ll be a matter of planning out where to put those improvements and gaining an idea of their costs so they’ll know how much to ask for when the study gets finalized, Philips said.

She said because of the funding opportunity at hand, there’s a deadline on it, but she pictures the planning getting wrapped up by the end of next summer.

“We don’t have a choice other than to have it done by October, but I think we have no problem reaching that goal,” Philips said. “Right now, we’re doing a lot of the technical studies, things that we kind of do behind the scenes — collecting that information that we need.”

Philips said they’ll then have focus groups, which Youngstown Councilwoman Samantha Turner, D-3rd Ward, mentioned earlier at the open house. Philips said they’re looking to have the groups meet this month and December.

Philips said officials plan on conducting another open house at the study’s midpoint, so they can show some of the new ideas they’ve been coming up with and collect more feedback at that point.