You develop a sixth sense for empty promises over four decades of covering local government.
From Cambridge to Fostoria, down through Springfield, and over the past 30-plus years here in Mansfield, I’ve watched mayors come and go. I have heard candidates wax poetic about revitalization.
And I have watched generations of leadership master the subtle art of kicking the can down the road.
It’s easy to kick that can. Patching asphalt is cheap. Slapping down a fresh coat of paint costs pennies. But actually digging into the gut of a city to fix what’s broken? That takes guts, money and political will — three commodities that rarely exist in the same room at the same time in any community.
Which brings me to what just wrapped on Main Street, which the community will celebrate near Central Park on Friday afternoon at 5 p.m.
Without question, this $20-plus million Main Street Corridor Improvement Project is the single biggest, most complex public/private local infrastructure endeavor I have witnessed in my journalism career.
It’s important to know that about 82% of the funding came from outside, non-local sources— primarily federal, state and regional infrastructure grants—with the city covering the remaining balance through local capital and utility enterprise funds.
(Below are Downtown Mansfield Inc. photos of the Main Street Corridor Improvement Project by Braxton Daniels/Studio 45.)
It began with the Mansfield Rising plan eight years ago
The real seeds of this transformation were planted back in 2018 with the Mansfield Rising plan.
That vision grew out of an expedition when the Richland County Foundation sent a contingent of 15 local leaders to the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas. They returned home refusing to accept the quiet decline of our urban center.
Rather than drafting another dry consultant’s report destined to gather dust on a shelf, they crafted a citizen-led blueprint designed to turn downtown into a place where people actually wanted to gather, linger and build a life.
Main Street wasn’t an isolated whim — it was the foundational spine of that entire strategy.
The city began to develop a blueprint for success five years ago
I remember when the actual blueprint first took shape back in 2021.
I sat in City Council discussions listening to city engineer Bob Bianchi lay out the cold, hard logistical realities. Downtown Mansfield Inc. CEO Jennifer Kime brought the fire and vision for what our urban core could actually become.
It was ambitious — almost dangerously so for a town that had grown accustomed to tempered expectations.
A few months later, in the heat of July 2021, I tagged along on a tour of Main Street when U.S. Rep. Troy Balderson rolled into town.
Armed with project renderings and quiet persistence, local leaders showed Balderson exactly where the cracks were — above and below ground.
Balderson was looking for worthy community projects; Mansfield had done its homework, aided by Jodie Perry, then the president/CEO of Richland Area Chamber & Economic Development.
Initial $2 million federal commitment lit the spark
That visit brought home an initial $2 million federal commitment, proving to the skeptics that this wasn’t just another pipe dream drawn up on a napkin.
That funding turned out to be the spark.
While cynics warned that local taxpayers would be crushed under the weight of such an overhaul, our leadership went hunting. They cobbled together roughly a dozen different funding streams — federal grants, state allocations, regional transportation funds, and private backing.
They captured outside money so effectively that the burden didn’t hollow out the city’s operating coffers. It was textbook municipal finance, though nobody ever throws a parade for a well-structured grant ledger.
Then came the dirt.
No one said any of this would be easy
Let’s be honest: the last 20 months have been brutal. There is no polite way to describe tearing open the central spine of a city.
I watched small business owners stand in front of their shops, staring across orange construction barrels, chain-link fences, and deep trenches that swallowed street parking whole.
I heard the justified frustration from merchants who had already survived the pandemic, only to find jackhammers, detour signs, and diesel fumes greeting their morning customers.
There were days when just getting from Park Avenue to Fifth Street felt like an expedition across a war zone.
(Below are Downtown Mansfield Inc. photos by Braxton Daniels/Studio 45 during the Main Street Corridor Improvement Project.)
Nobody enjoys living inside a construction site. But navigating the detours and dusty mornings, stopping to look past the stone veneer plazas and brick crosswalks, it all told a deeper story.
This project was never just a fancy “streetscape.” If all we did was buy decorative lamp posts and plant ornamental trees, it would have been an unforgivable waste of capital.
The real miracle of this project happened 12 feet under the dirt. Crews were ripping out cast-iron water mains that were literally laid down in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
They replaced brittle, decaying storm and sanitary sewers that had outlived their engineered lifespans by half a century. They rewired electrical feeds and modernized signal grids held together by municipal baling wire and prayer.
You see, for decades, city administrations did what every city administration in Rust Belt Ohio did: they paved over the rot. It’s human nature.
Mayors want ribbons to cut before election day, and you can’t hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a 12-inch ductile iron water pipe buried under five feet of gravel. So council after council looked at the price tag of underground utility replacement, shuddered, and shoved the problem onto the next generation.
Until current city leaders finally said: No more.
The hard is what makes it great
They chose the hard path. They chose 20 months of dust, merchant complaints, traffic tie-ups, and budget scrutiny to ensure that Mansfield’s downtown won’t suffer as many catastrophic main breaks or flooded basements for the next 75 years.
The sleek crosswalks, the Central Park gathering spots, and the pedestrian lighting are the reward, but the buried infrastructure is the foundation.
This was largely a local project that provided local jobs. It was designed by K.E. McCartney & Associates of Mansfield. The primary contractor was Kokosing Construction. Many of the men and women who did the work are members of local trade unions.
Yet, anyone who has covered municipal government as long as I have knows a fundamental truth: progress is never finished. A city is a living organism, not a museum exhibit you unveil, polish, and walk away from.
Today’s ribbon cutting is a milestone worth savoring, but it is a celebration along the way, not the finish line. We have shored up the historic core, but Mansfield is far more than six blocks of Main Street.
Our neighborhoods, from the north end to the south side, have their own aging pipes, crumbling curbs, housing stock deficits, and forgotten corridors that demand the same courage and relentless hustle for outside capital.
The success on Main Street cannot become an island of prosperity in a sea of deferred maintenance. It must serve as the working template for the heavy lifting still ahead across every ward of this city.
This project is YOUR victory, Mansfield
My own clock is ticking. Soon enough, I’ll be cleaning out my desk, packing up the notebooks and leaving the Richland Source newsroom.
Retirement is knocking, and after decades of chronicling Mansfield’s victories, tragedies, and near-misses, I naturally begin to measure what was built versus what was simply talked about.
Mansfield has taken its lumps over the decades. I’ve covered the factory closings, the blight and the agonizingly slow climb back. I remember well what downtown Mansfield was like when I came here in 1990 — seedy bars, massage parlors, boarded up buildings and some things even worse.
But standing on Main Street today, seeing clean lines, functioning water systems, vibrant plazas, and a downtown that respects both its heritage and its future, I can say this with total certainty:
You didn’t just rebuild a road. You finally stopped kicking the can. Your community took the blow, paid the price in patience and set Mansfield up to thrive for generations to come.
And for an old newsman who has seen far too many plans gather dust on a shelf, there’s no better headline than that.
(Carl Hunnell is the deputy managing editor at Richland Source. He began his journalism career while still a college student in 1979.)
