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Monday, Jan. 12, 2009

Retired Macon architect outlines vision for Macon

The Macon architect who built the international firm that designed the Georgia Dome and CNN Center in Atlanta is pitching a long-term vision for his hometown.

Now 81 and retired, Bill Thompson penned a 20-page plan for the city in March 2007. It’s a call for leadership and grandiose new projects. In recent months, his mostly handwritten plan has made the rounds with a few local leaders.

They describe it as forward looking, if not particularly affordable.

Thompson would radically alter the way people think about downtown Macon, building on the existing river walk along the Ocmulgee River and connecting it to downtown. But, more than that, he wants to hear people talking about what Macon should look like decades from now.

“It doesn’t have to be this,” Thompson, a founder of Thompson, Ventulett, Stainback & Associates, said of his vision statement.

“It’s ... a concept, not a plan, to identify things that need to be done on a visionary basis and then put together the ability, with young people and leadership people, to identify what projects we need to go after and how to get them done, including financing,” he said.

Macon does lots of planning, overseen by a lot of different groups. But seldom does it look this far out or integrate projects the way Thompson describes, Mayor Robert Reichert said. Reichert said he’d like to be a proactive mayor and believes he has a management team in place after his first year in office that will allow him to focus more on the big picture.

But the city’s financial problems — an eroded tax base, no money to increase police salaries, no money to close the city’s unlined landfill and not enough money to fix the aging downtown storm sewer system — haven’t gone away.

“We’ve got some fierce problems that confront us, and some that need our attention today, right now,” Reichert said. “And so it’s hard to be proactive.”

Thompson’s plan calls for a leadership committee “with emphasis on the younger generation.” The committee would identify public and private building projects in various parts of the city, as well as ways to improve quality of life in other areas such as education.

“Vision is a word that you don’t often hear,” Thompson wrote in the all-capped penmanship typical of architects. “Also dreamers, who are also doers, have become rare. Instead of retreating and taking cover, business and government leaders need to embark on new ventures to bring improvements and prosperity to our area.”

When it comes to specific projects, Thompson suggests a new “L-shaped public access corridor” that would run from the Terminal Station downtown to the river walk along the Ocmulgee, the hotel under construction at the Macon Coliseum, the Ocmulgee Mounds, Fort Hawkins, Bond Swamp, Brown’s Mount and Bowden Golf Course.

That’s the east-west part of the L-shaped corridor. The north-south part of the “L” would run from Terminal Station through downtown Macon’s museum district and past well-known downtown landmarks all the way to College Street. That would then connect to the College Hill Corridor improvements being planned through a partnership with Mercer University.

An old tunnel behind Terminal Station, now blocked over in concrete, would be reopened to provide new access to the brownfield area behind Terminal Station. It also would connect the two parts of the L-shaped corridor, according to Thompson’s plan. A new platform overlooking the Ocmulgee River could be built at an existing railroad bridge across the river to provide “for dramatic river views,” Thompson wrote.

Mike Ford, who heads the downtown Macon booster group NewTown Macon, called Thompson a “genius.”

NewTown is one year into its own five-year plan for downtown, and plans for 25 or 50 years from now don’t really exist, Ford said.

Asked how realistic Thompson’s plan is, Ford said “we don’t really know.”

“It’s just that he’s way ahead of us,” Ford said. “We always have to fall back on the practicality (of ideas). Bill doesn’t have to do that.”

Thompson, who designed the Macon Coliseum, has worked primarily outside of Macon. His firm built convention centers in more than 40 cities and has projects now in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates and China, according to its Web site. He has lived in Macon since 1950, but he said he hasn’t been actively involved in most of the city’s planning efforts.

Longtime friend Ben Porter, a fellow retired businessman and world traveler who has lived in Macon for many years, said financing is “the biggest problem” facing any major plans for the city. But there’s also been a fundamental shift in Macon leadership, he said.

Whereas Macon used to have a lot of decision makers in its business community — company owners and bank presidents — now it has mostly local managers for larger banks and corporations. They have less decision-making power and “we don’t have the community leadership and drive that we had years ago,” Porter said.

The only two visionaries that Porter identified in Macon were Thompson and former Mercer University President Kirby Godsey.

“And both of them are retired,” he said.

To contact writer Travis Fain, call 744-4213.