Thursday evening the plans for the new SKiP Playground were shown to Council with both a video and the site plan. This new playground will offer play ground equipment for up to age 12, a seating area with tables, several interactive musical equipment pieces, and several ninja warrior style pieces. This has been a long time coming and I know the public will much enjoy the plans and design to be shared shortly. The new SKiP playground will be located in a similar location to the old playground to be able to take advantage to the shade offered by the trees and will be fenced in as well. The equipment for the playground has been ordered and expected to arrive by June 2022 for installation shortly thereafter. This wouldn’t be possible without some great sponsors: Cleveland Clinic Children’s, Western Reserve Hospital, Giant Eagle, RMG, Ron Marhofer, Energy Harbor, and the Stow-Munroe Falls Community Foundation. I look forward to seeing this for use by residents by this fall.
There were several planning items on the agenda this past week, including two that are located in Ward 2. The first involves a re-zoning on Fishcreek Road to a high commercial district, though the property is owned by Hope Homes and the re-zoning is to allow for a 4-unit adult special needs group home. This new facility will be a single-story building and will also have a walking trail from the facility over to the Hope Homes building on the corner of Call and Stow Road. This had initially come before Council last month to look at re-zoning residential, however, that zoning was not supported by the Planning Commission, so Council asked them to review the project as a commercial zoning which they did support unanimously. I believe this will be a good use of the property, has little to no impact on traffic along Fishcreek, meets our comprehensive plan, and supports a local business that has been in our community for years supporting those with disabilities, so I fully supported this item. This will require 3 readings and a public hearing so Council will vote on this after the public hearing at our meeting on March 24th.
The next item in Ward 2 was a planned two lane drive thru coffee kiosk on Norton Road just east of the Burger King. This new coffee kiosk would be built on an existing paved out lot in the Norton Road plaza and would feature upscale coffee options with the goal of being quick and efficient to grab a cup of coffee. While I am not a coffee drinker myself, I do agree that this location will catch a lot of traffic on their way to work in the morning and the site plan allows for good queuing and traffic flow in the plaza. I also think this will be a visual improvement in the plaza there and hopefully that will also help attract new people to seeing businesses within the plaza. This item passed unanimously, and I look forward to welcoming this business to Ward 2.
There was also the approval of an additional Fogg Property building on Gray Lane (west of Route 8 off of Seasons Road). Fogg has developed the land to the east of Seasons Road and has helped bring multiple new businesses into Stow and Summit County over the last several years. This building will look very similar to the current buildings they have built to the east and while they do not currently have any tenants for this location, they are actively pursuing tenants. The biggest issue in this area is potential stormwater issues being near the Mud Brook conservation area, which requires much stricter design of stormwater retention that will actually improve the stormwater quality in that area once it is developed. This item passed unanimously.
Last, and certainly not least, Council approved a Contract with CivicPlus for a new website and more importantly an emergency alert service. The ability of our website to be user friendly has been talked about since 2019, however the size of our website has made the idea of upgrading it a large undertaking that just had not made any movement. With this contract the City will begin to use CivicEngage for our website and the project is expected to take 8 months, with the new website to be up and operational by the end of 2022. A large part of this timeline will be reviewing the 400+ pages currently on our City Website and reducing them to a more user friendly format. The second part of this project is the use of the CivicReady platform that allows for residents to sign up and customize alerts they would like to receive from the City of Stow. This is an important service that often may go unnoticed until we have an emergency and a quick notice needs to go to residents. This was a large discussion after the major water line break and boil alert that came from it a few months ago. While the City used to have our own service, it was discontinued after the administration felt it wasn’t providing the necessary service under the contract. At that time, the City began relying on the County reverse alert system, however, it did not seem that most residents were aware of the change or the County system and were not signed up to receive the alerts. This new system will be just within our city, will allow users to customize both the type of alerts and method of alerts they would like to receive. The alert system portion of this project is on a much shorter timeline than the website project and they are hoping to complete the project in 8 weeks. This item passed unanimously.
Our next Council meeting will be on March 10th with Committee starting time to be announced closer to the date and the Council meeting to follow the committee meetings.