The urban design consultants the city of Akron is considering to remake the Innerbelt were supposed to have as long as 15 months to talk to community members about what they wanted to happen with the stretch of freeway before applying for federal money to help fund it.
Read more: Can the Akron Innerbelt project bring healing?
But a few weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Transportation consolidated three years of funding into one application, due in September, upending the city’s timeline.
“It’s a pretty significant wrench,” Akron Director of Planning Kyle Julien said Tuesday.
Already, the city has selected four urban design firms as finalists to create a vision and proposal for what to do with the former freeway that destroyed a predominantly Black neighborhood when it was built in the 1970s. Julien said the original plan had been to choose a firm by mid-August, though he might move up the selection a week.
Whether doing so would allow the city to meet a Sept. 30 application deadline is still unknown.
“How we approach the funding deadline has yet to be determined,” he said. “We have not decided yet if we will meet the deadline.”
Akron received $960,000 in 2023 from the DOT to develop a master plan for the Innerbelt. With its consolidated funding, the Reconnecting Communities program has $607 million in grants to distribute, including $457 million in construction funding. Communities receiving the grant money must provide a 50% local match; the grants are expected to range from $5 million to $100 million.
The proposals that the four firms responded to, Julien said, included an expectation that the consultant would create the federal application. He said that source of funding had long been a goal, but the city would figure out how to pivot if necessary.
“We’re going to have years and years of work to do to do this right,” he said. “It doesn’t mean it can’t get done.”
Julien spoke after a Sound of Ideas community tour program at the Knight Stage in downtown Akron focused on reimagining the Innerbelt. The discussion will air Aug. 5 at 9 a.m. and again at 9 p.m. on the WKSU radio show.
Julien said the four firms that had been selected as finalists understood that their primary assignment in moving forward would be to focus on the Innerbelt’s future not as a design problem, but as a question of values.
The intention of the city, he said, is to build trust with families who were displaced and other interested community members to help rebuild some of what was destroyed.
“How are we going to create value that’s going to be reparative and address the harms of the past?” he asked. “It’s not mostly an urban design problem, it’s an equity problem.”
Julien was one of seven panelists who spoke about the Innerbelt project, what it had done to Akron and what was necessary going forward. Members of the audience also shared their memories and priorities regarding the area.
Julien would offer no clues about what the end result of the plan might be, except to say that the road needs to be “right-sized” to be smaller.
Charlie Nelson, the president of Nelson Development, said he wasn’t sure the project needed a road “right through the middle” at all. Nelson told the panelists that he thinks having people live in the area is key.
Despite the waning availability of federal funds, Nelson warned city leaders to be careful about chasing the money just because the deadline had moved up.
“Don’t let early dollars lock you in to anything,” he said.
What happens next will make all the difference for the city, said Thomas Tatum, a retired director of planning and urban development for Akron who now runs Tatum Endeavor Group.
Tatum said the federal move to distribute money so quickly throws a “monkey wrench” into the process, but doesn’t change the city’s imperative to be thoughtful about what comes next for the Innerbelt project.
“You had a whole ecosystem that was destroyed,” he told the panelists. “You’d better get it right.”
