KALAMAZOO (WKZO-AM) — Well over 100 Kalamazoo residents turned out Thursday evening in a church gymnasium in the Edison Neighborhood for a second workshop on the Kalamazoo Imagine 2025 master planning process.
City Manager Jim Ritsema was there. He says they will have $30-million to spend over the next three years for aspirational projects and they hope ideas that come out of this planning process will direct where a lot of that money will go.
Neighborhoods were asked to take a wish list of projects, programs and improvements developed at the earlier workshop and whittle the number down. Some of the requests wereserious like the need for jobs programs, housing maintenance for the elderly and poor and some not so serious, like the community trampoline requested by someone in the Oakwood Neighborhood. Ritsema said the insurance liability would cost more than the trampolines.
He says the loftiest and overarching goal will be to seriously reduce or eliminate generational poverty in the community, “ we are also talking about how we invest in our youth, and create the programming around that. And then a lot of the projects and programs that are going to come out of this (Imagine 2025) are really going to create the base for all that to occur”.
The Imagine 2025 planning effort is scheduled to generate a report and recommendations to the City Commission next March.
