Electric City steering group to meet March 23

A meeting is schedule for Thursday this week to move Electric City’s Pathway and Revitalization plan forward.

The local committee steering the plan will meet from 3-5 p.m. March 23, at Electric City’s city hall, in the council chambers.

The group — made up of Councilmember Aaron Derr, and local residents Cynthia Greely, Lynda Anderson, Clark Perman and Jeff Piturachsatit — will review the final plan from WSU, for the broad-viewed, long-range plan to improve the city and its efforts to be more visitor friendly.

The meeting is open to the public.

The committee will review and try to make recommendations to the city’s planner for review and eventual recommendation to the city council.

About a year ago, a meeting of community groups started the process for Electric City to make its move into the future. It was followed by Grant County Health District preparing a community survey to get public input into the project.

Several public meetings were held to air proposals, and that’s when Washington State University’s Rural Communities Design Initiative team, made up of professors and students, took on the task of coming up with a design of what the city’s improvement plan might look like.

Electric City officials were careful to state that the plan is really a beginning point and that it is long range in scope.

The Pathway and Revitalization plan deals with parks, community upgrades, trails and a general visual improvement. The success of the plan has to do with how successful the city is in obtaining grants to move the plan along.

Thursday’s meeting, if successful, will move the WSU-prepared plan along to the city’s planner for review. It would eventually move to the city council for final approval.

The city hopes to file grant requests for at least the parks plans in 2018.