ORANGE PARK, Fla. – A series of meetings were held this week to workshop the revision of the town of Orange Park. A group of small business owners gathered Wednesday at Town Hall to weigh in on the future and plans for a walkable town square to be built by 2040.
The proposal is for the town square to be near Town Hall, which sits at Kingsley and Park avenues. Everyone who came to the meeting got a pair of red and green stickers. They were able to use them to describe what they liked and disliked about the future design of the town square.
Megan Futch, the owner of Natural Healing Day Spa on Kingsley Avenue, said it was exciting to see what everyone collectively agreed on.
“You know, I think these look cool, unique,” Futch said while describing which style of residential buildings she was a fan of. “You know, [the buildings] have some character to them. We don’t like houses where everything looks the same and boring.”
Design-build firm Haskell is consulting the town on the potential for Orange Park’s town square. Many residents expressed a desire for a central hub during the Visioning 2040 initiative, a project completed in 2020 that established a vision and action plan for the future.
Fred Jones, the director of the Haskell Planning and Design team, led Wednesday’s session. He explained that the idea behind using the stickers was to better suit their design to the town’s needs.
“What we’ve done is we’ve grouped things into a series of categories, whether they might be buildings, whether they may be residential, as well as just all of the ingredients that go into a public realm,” Jones said. “There’s all of these adjacencies around the town hall that have the potential to be redeveloped into new vibrant commercial spaces and retail. So, you start thinking about new restaurants and sidewalk cafes and alleyways.”
Safer roads, better restaurants, and keeping local businesses a priority were some of the concerns expressed by local business owners.
“We always travel and spend money elsewhere, you know, so it’d be cool to have more great options here in our hometown,” Futch said. “Anything new involving change is scary at first. But I’m glad we’re having meetings and I’m open to ideas and discussions to see where this could go.”
Part of these plans will eventually call for slower speed limits and street parking on Kingsley Avenue. Jones encouraged residents to think of what the Neptune Beach Town Center looks like as the vision for this area.
A final design proposal will be completed by Haskell and proposed sometime in September.
“What we’re trying to do is say, look, this is your vision, this is your framework, from which we want you to develop your future Town Center. So that’s really it. It’s a roadmap,” Jones said.
Local leaders are encouraging those who could not make it to the in-person session to weigh in through an online survey.