By Matt Fredmonsky
Record-Courier staff writer
The city manager of Normal, Ill. addressed Kent City Council Wednesday on an on-going $80 million redevelopment in the community with similar component projects on the cusp in Kent.
Mark Peterson described his city, which is home to Illinois State University, as a dying little college town when Normal City Council began planning in 1999 for a robust redevelopment.
All total, with public, private, state and federal dollars, Peterson said $336 million will be spent during eight years to finish the redevelopment of six to seven blocks of Normal by 2012.
"You've got what to me are great bones, great raw material," Peterson said of Kent's existing downtown district. "Far more than we started with our downtown redevelopment project."
Normal city leaders hired a planner from Chicago to essentially re-design the city's downtown. The city, which was debt free at the start of the project, incurred its share by taking on $80 million in debt to purchase land, construct new buildings, raze existing structures and provide facade improvement grant money.
Peterson said the city's portion funded several projects, which included:
$17 million for replacing infrastructure, which included sewers, water lines, sidewalks and streets
$13.5 million for a 43,000-square-foot conference center attached to a 229-room Marriot Hotel with a 500-car parking deck
$9.5 million on property acquisition
$9 million for a transportation/multi-modal facility
$6.5 million for a children's discovery museum, which sees more than 100,000 visitors annually
Peterson said the city's public investment resulted in $231 million in private investment in new buildings and remodeled structures, and the university did not commit any funding to the process.
While Kent and Normal share certain aspects, there are considerable differences between both cities. According to U.S. Census data compiled by Kent's city manager office, Normal's population is nearly double Kent's 27,946 at 50,681. A quarter of Kent's households make less than $15,000 annually, whereas 15 percent of Normal's households have the same income.
Housing stock in both cities also varies. The median home age in Kent is 39 years. In Normal, the median home age is 26. Fifty-eight percent of the residences in Kent are rentals, whereas 43 percent of Normal's residences are renter-occupied.
Kent City Manager Dave Ruller acknowledged the differences between both cities in an interview before Wednesday's council work session. But Ruller said Peterson's presentation was relevant given the similarities of both communities' planned development projects.
"One of the most important things I hope to get from this is how they made the pieces work together," Ruller said. "They put a lot of pieces together really to transform that city, and that's kind of what we're trying to get rolling here."