Chris Watson, owner of Bridge and Watson Inc. in Oxford, is an urban planner who has been working with the Gluckstadt community since 2006 when he helped them get an incorporation attempt off the ground. Now, he continues to work on a contract basis as the Gluckstadt City Planner.
“They got the signatures, they navigated their way through the court process, and they now have a city to build,” Watson said. “Among the first things we did upon incorporation was to help them take care of the bare necessities, such as developing a municipal budget, (putting planning and zoning in place, and a lot of other guidance along the way).”
Watson said he doesn’t want to be presumptuous that he will be the one creating a master development plan for the city as that contract still needs to be set up, but he assumes he will be the one to guide them through that work.
“If I am the guy to do that for them, that is probably going to get rolling pretty strong in the next 30 days or so,” Watson said. “That is going to be a lengthy process. It is going to involve a lot of public input.”
Watson said as an urban planner, he can develop ideas of how Gluckstadt should develop, but he doesn’t live in the community. Therefore, his ideas are not necessarily the best ideas of what citizens want their community to become, and the ideas that will be used will require a lot of groundwork.
“It is difficult to say that I possess a vision for the city,” Watson said. “I have a number of things in mind that are technical in nature that relate to good planning practice, growth in the city tax base, and maintaining and enhancing quality of life in the community. You can arrive at those things through different avenues. The question is how would the community like to arrive at those places?”
For an example, Watson gave the importance of growing Gluckstadt’s tax base, because revenues have to grow as the cost of business and demand for services increases. The question that comes with this is how might the community want to see the city develop?
“People have mentioned to me potential architectural themes they’d like to see, and there are people in the community that prefer certain types of development over other types of development,” Watson said.
He said, often, the development community wants one thing and the citizens want something different. His goal is to meet in the middle and do something that is good for the developers, citizens, and elected officials.
One thing that will be discussed will be a downtown area. Watson said “the magic” in a traditional downtown atmosphere comes from a dense environment full of population in close proximity, certain architectural controls and standards, and pedestrian friendly window shopping.
“Personally, for the benefit of the community, I would love for Gluckstadt to have a place like that,” Watson said. “Now, as far as sitting down with a map and saying “X marks the spot” – No, I haven’t done anything like that. That is exactly the type of thing that would have to be developed in conjunction with input, not only from the citizens, but from the development community. Any plan that introduces that concept is going to impact someone’s private property. It would be nice to have them on board and included in the process of developing those concepts.”
