Readers Vote 'No' on Downtown Concord's Complete Streets Project

It's now crunch time. 

Tonight, the Concord City Council will decide whether or not to approve the Complete Streets Downtown Concord economic development and safety project. 

The public hearing begins at 7 p.m. in the council chamber on 37 Green St. 

Yesterday, we asked readers what they thought about the project in an online poll. The poll was open for a little less than 24 hours and 77 percent of those who participated said they city council shouldn't approve the project. 

Most of the commenters on the post - as well as the number of stories and blog posts about the project during the last year - were against the project. 

"I just do not believe that wide sidewalks and less vehicle traffic is going to bring an influx of new customers downtown," one person wrote while another said that it was high rents that were the problem. "If there are interesting stores, people will come regardless of the width of sidewalks or number of shade trees." Another commenter agreed, saying shops downtown mostly sell "non-essential 'artisan' fancy goods ... at astronomical prices ..." 

"Main Street's main problem is not a lack of fountains, benches, or aesthetics," the person wrote. "The problem with Main Street is that it doesn't sell what we want at prices we can afford during hours we can shop."

Other commenters noted that the city of Concord is already having a hard time paying for maintenance at its two downtown parks. "The only reason why this is still moving forward is the City, Council and Mayor will look bad if it doesn't proceed."

However, one commenter thought the negativity about the project wasn't a positive way to look at things. 

"We have a 4.7 million dollar grant available to us for this project after a group of awesome and very hard working people put in tons of man hours to go through the application process," he wrote. "These same people also spent countless hours doing research on other cities and what they went through during their redevelopment and what happened afterwards."