January 14/15 - the Cary Town Council & Senior Staff held a retreat to discuss, informally, a round-table brainstorming session regarding the future of Cary. Today was mainly an opportunity to throw items onto the table, sift through, and establish topics to focus on for the remainder of the two-day event. The downtown featured heavily in the second day's discussions.

Cary Citizen has a couple of extensive articles on the Council/Staff retreat. Check them out here:

http://www.carycitizen.com/2011/01/18/council-staff-retreat-part-1/

http://www.carycitizen.com/2011/01/19/council-staff-retreat-part-2/

http://www.carycitizen.com/2010/01/19/cary-town-council-retreat-part-3/

And they featured a special article just on the Downtown section of the retreat! Entitled Where All the Lights are Bright, here is a snippet from that article.

In this new alternative, Staff divided the core Town Center area into three districts:

• Academy Street South – the heart of the Town Center historic district that includes the old Cary Elementary building
• Chatham Street corridor – the main east-west artery through downtown
• Downtown North district – anchored by Town Hall

In particular, Staff showed how it could be possible to build a new Wake County regional library downtown, next to the planned Town Park in the Academy South district. Previously, that vicinity was the planned site for a Performing Arts Center.

Building the downtown library near old Cary Elementary would make it more difficult to build the planned Performing Arts Center and its associated parking decks in that same vicinity, so Staff showed how the Performing Arts Center might instead be built in the Downtown North district – north of the railroad tracks in the general vicinity of Town Hall. Pursuing this option might also allow for a hotel and other development, such as offices and residences, in this area.

Finally, the Chatham Street district was shown as potentially hosting retail shopping, restaurants and other attractions.