City of York to host Community Visioning Meeting for revitalization planning

YORK, Ala. (WTOK) - City officials in York, Alabama are giving residents an opportunity to help in its plan to better the city and surrounding communities.

What’s your vision for York, Alabama? That’s the question city leaders are asking you. That’s why they are hosting a community visioning meeting Thursday to discuss and plan the revitalization of the city.

“York has some of the combinations that most small rural communities and some urban communities have such as depopulation and disinvestment which leads to predictable outcomes such as VAD which I call vacant dilapidated properties. Limited sources of income and also out-migration of human capital. So what we want to be able to do is reverse that trend that has been happening for the last 50+ years. Give the people an opportunity to imagine and give input on where we can be,” said Mayor Willie Lake.

Mayor Lake said leaders identified problems in the city years ago. But they now want to work with the public to help come up with strategies and solutions to figure out how to move the city forward.

“You get more buy-in. I can easily come up with a Mayor Lake plan but it may not be what the community wants and needs. So I want to make sure we get input from the community because they’re invested, they have stayed here, they have lived here, and they didn’t out-migrate. So we want to get everybody involved so they can get buy-in. Because if I just create a plan, it may just wind up being a plan that collects dust on a shelf and we don’t want that. We want a living plan that we can update, revitalize and we can see progress over a 3, 5, and 10-year period,” said Mayor Lake.

Mayor Lake said they are also accepting input from surrounding communities because it takes a collective effort to better the city.

“We’re in the process of getting a new city hall, we’re also looking to do a community center and also do a festival park in the next 24 to 36 months so we’re moving but we’d like to get the citizens’ input to make sure we’re including the things they’d like to see. We started the process already with the HUD enterprise community. We’re able to get into the HUD program where they assist rural communities, in developing a strategic plan, financial management, and also downtown redevelopment,” said Mayor Lake.

Mayor Lake said they have a few more meetings scheduled but their goal is to have a plan developed and presented for printing by November or December of this year. 

The Community Visioning Meeting will be held Thursday, March 30th from 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. at the Pop Start Community Space. Located at 211 Broad St. in downtown York.

For more information about the meeting contact the City of York at 205-392-5231 or visit https://www.cityofyorkal.org/

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