A Tour of What's to Come

C-SPARC Members Get Tour of Proposed Project

From the Times Community
By Jason Jacks
Feb. 16, 2006

Some of those partially responsible for the area's coming building boom are almost giddy about what they still envision for downtown Springfield.

“A Wegmans!” proclaimed Skeeter Scheid, president of the Central Springfield Area Revitalization Council, or C-SPARC, referring to the giant grocery chain.

“ I would like to see a really good nursery in central Springfield,” said Linda Waller, from Supervisor Dana Kauffman's office.

“You mean one for plants?” Scheid asked.

“Yes,” Waller shot back.

With a Marriott hotel, a Waterford banquet hall, a parking garage and a massive upscale development breaking ground or in the rezoning pipeline, why not shoot for the stars, they asked.

Bob Gray, a past president of C-SPARC, an advisory council to Kauffman (D-Lee), is manning the steering wheel on this tour. Pointing back at the Richard Byrd Library on Commerce Street, he said “it will be a better mixed-use development” if the facility is indeed moved to Midtown Springfield.

Now cutting through the parking lot of Springfield Plaza, Scheid looks across Old Keene Mill Road at the vacant Circuit City building. All three hint at the property possibly being the site of a commuter parking garage. Scheid said she hopes retail and businesses will both be part of the structure.

“If you have people using it 24/7, it makes for a more interesting area,” she explained.

Over lunch at the Tower Shopping Center's Springfield Pizzeria, the group, now joined by Bob Stockton of Bob's Barber Shop, talks of KSI's plans for the nearby Tower building property.

“This is going to be a centerpiece,” Stockton, also a pilot, said of the company's yet-to-be-approved luxury community, his hand brushing over an aerial photo of Springfield.

Scheid, an artist, said C-SPARC is accomplishing what it set out to do more than 20 years ago.

“We are closer to the brass ring than we have ever been,” she said.

© Times Community Newspapers 2006