Mansfield reinventing its heart: $16.5 million Main Street project just the start, says mayor

MANSFIELD — Mayor Jodie Perry said Tuesday night a planned $16.5 million Main Street Corridor Improvement Project is just the start for Mansfield.

“I think this project has opened certainly my eyes, but a lot of other people’s eyes, too, about what Mansfield can do when we get outside of the box where we think of what we’re owed and go more towards what we deserve.

“And we deserve to have a really great downtown,” Perry said about the project, for which the city obtained 80 percent outside funding.

“That doesn’t mean we’re not going to go after and try to fix other parts of town. This is a really great example … we’re leveraging about $3 million local dollars on a $16 million project,” Perry said.

“That math makes sense all day every day and we want to do that with a lot of other projects. We’ve got a lot of good projects on the radar screen. We’re really excited for this … just to cut the ribbon and be done with it and move on to the next project,” she said.

Perry revealed Tuesday night to City Council two new videos produced by EMH&T that provide a visual preview of the Main Street project expected to begin in early 2025.

The 18-month project will completely re-do the streetscape from Sixth Street to First Street through the downtown, converting it into two-way traffic at the same time, with the goal of revitalizing the city’s center.

The seeds for the project were planted during the Mansfield Rising plan in 2018 after a group of 15 local residents attended the SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas.

The group’s trip, funded through the Richland County Foundation, tasked local attendees with returning to write a plan for revitalizing downtown Mansfield.

The group included Perry, then the leader of Richland Area Chamber & Economic Development, city engineer Bob Bianchi and Downtown Mansfield Inc. CEO Jennifer Kime.

Before City Council Tuesday, Perry attended the second Kaleidoscope Speaker Series event at the Renaissance Theater. She repeated to council something she heard Source Media Properties CEO Jay Allred, also a Mansfield Rising participant, say at the Kaleidoscope event.

“(Allred) mentioned attacking problems with a culture of abundance instead of a scarcity mindset and that was one of the challenges given to us in the Mansfield Rising project,” Perry said.

“Don’t just go in thinking about what you expect, but really go in and think about what should the city have? This is a really great example.

“This project started small. It has grown to be a project just over $16 million at this stage of the game,” Perry said, showing council photos taken Tuesday showing the obvious state of disrepair now seen along Main Street.

“When you talk about the front door of our community, this is what everyone is seeing,” she said.

Bianchi told council it’s been a long process over the past several years. He told Richland Source late last week the city recently received the Stage Three plan from K.E. McCartney and Associates, the same Mansfield firm that helped the city write the proposal which earned a $7.38 million federal RAISE grant to help fund the work.

“We never thought … if anybody would have said to us years ago that we’re going to have a $16 million project, I would have said that’s crazy.

“That doesn’t make sense … how we could ever get to that point? But with all the hard work with the collaboration and the support of City Council, we were able to get ($13.2 million) in grant dollars,” Bianchi said.

“We will use local funds and, of course, we’ll be back to talk about that. We will talk about the construction in more detail (and) public involvement components. We will be back to talk about (the Main Street) project probably in September or October and talk about the project starting in early 2025,” he said.

Bianchi said there are still a couple of properties that need to be acquired. He also noted reviews by the Ohio Department of Transportation and the federal government must be completed.

“We anticipate getting that (approval) in September, at which time we will advertise for bids for the project for six weeks,” he said.

“We will open bids and hope to award a contract in November,” the engineer said.

The project could begin as soon as January, depending on the weather. Bianchi said it will start with installation of a new water main, signal foundations and storm sewers, with work starting at Sixth Street and moving south.

The work will be done in segments, one block at a time, to reduce overall disruptions in terms of traffic and impact on businesses along the corridor. There will be time elements built into the contract to maintain progress, Bianchi said.

Kime said it’s been an exciting project to work on in partnership with the city, thanking City Council for its support.

“We know that it’s going to get real serious next year and construction is going to be real big. We talk a lot about communication and how that’s going to go both to the public (and) businesses, people who hold events downtown.

“Our Main Street and our downtown are the heart of our community and it’s really important that it reflects the private investment that’s come into town.

“Through the Mansfield Rising project, we’ve had almost $20 million of total investment in the last last five years and a lot of that’s private investment. We want this to be an opportunity for really the public infrastructure to match and reflect the private investment that’s been going on for 20 years in town.

“When you look at the building and infrastructure that’s come in, this is a really good way to reflect the growth and the future of Mansfield downtown,” Kime said.

The second video displayed the traffic plan that will encourage southbound motorists to use Mulberry Street when going “through” Mansfield and Main Street when planning “to” visit the downtown once two-way traffic begins.

In recent years, the city converted Mulberry to two-way traffic with two lanes going south and one going north. It also converted Diamond Street to two-way, with two lanes going north and one lane going south.

‘We know that ‘through’ traffic is very important from getting from the north side of town to the south side of town. We want to maintain that flow, that efficiency, while we make Main Street two-way,” Bianchi said.

“Right now, the through traffic uses Main Street, even though the (traffic) signals don’t necessarily favor that progression. The through traffic where the signals will favor the progression will be from Fifth Street, to Mulberry, to Second and to Main,” he said.

“There’s a couple more turns but it’s actually more efficient based off how the signals operate,” he said.

That traffic signalization plan is already in place, he said, adding motorists going through town will make the journey about three minutes quicker by using the Mulberry Street route.