HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - Dennis Madsen has been in town only since mid-January, but he's beginning to formulate some strong ideas about Huntsville's future.

A Massachusetts native and longtime Atlanta resident, Madsen beat out more than 140 applicants last fall to become the city's first manager or urban and long-range planning. He previous employer, Urban Collage, specializes in the design of walkable, livable urban communities.

Madsen sat down with The Times last week to talk about his planning philosophy, Huntsville traffic, the Courthouse Square, a new downtown baseball stadium and other topics. Below is a condensed version of that conversation, which took place May 14 at Sam & Greg's pizzeria.

Your wife is from Huntsville, so you were familiar with the city before you decided to take this job. Now that you're living here, what are your impressions of Huntsville from a planning standpoint?

"I'm very optimistic. I think because there's a lot of growth pressures, there's a lot of opportunity. I compare it to pruning a healthy tree versus trying to revive a dead tree. This is a very healthy community, but I think we're getting at the point now where we have to shape how the growth is actually occurring. What I've gotten a sense of is that people are actually anxious to do some planning, which is a little surprising. Most places you go people are like, 'Oh, why do you need a plan? Just let things happen.' But here, almost everyone I've talked to has said we really need to take a long-range view of things. It may be because it's a city of engineers; they don't build anything until they figure out exactly how it's going to be put together."

It seems like every new store and restaurant opening lately is either in Jones Valley or the Bridge Street/Cummings Research Park area. Why do retailers seem to be avoiding the north and south ends of Memorial Parkway?

"It's not necessarily that they avoid, it's more that they clump. You'll start to see inroads in one area, and other retailers will go, 'Oh, that's clearly the place to be.' They'll look at demographics and they'll look at growth, but, for the most part, you plant a seed in one area and a lot of others flock to it. I still think we probably need to do some work to identify some redevelopment areas, especially in north Huntsville. South Parkway is probably an issue. Haysland Square, I know, has been a concern. I think in order to do that, we need to change how we think of redevelopment. You don't necessarily have to replace a strip mall with a strip mall. If we can open it up and say, 'Maybe a mixed-use development goes here instead of a clearly retail development.' That gives us a little more flexibility, and it may attract some more of that investment in other places as well. But the reason we're seeing what is happening now is (retailers) follow a herd. The Jones Valley Target development was like throwing chum in the water."

Huntsville just got word from the Alabama Department of Transportation that the overpasses at Byrd Spring and Lily Flagg roads have been delayed until 2020 due to lack of money. How hard is it to keep traffic flowing smoothly in a state with limited tax revenues?

As Huntsville's only north-south corridor, Memorial Parkway is becoming increasingly congested. (Bob Gathany | bgathany@al.com)

"I'm learning it's pretty hard. I don't think our problems are bad right now, but ideally we'd do something before it gets bad. A lot of this is colored by my experience living in Atlanta, which is a traffic crucible. You plan your day around how you're going to avoid the worst traffic snarls. There's 21 lanes or so on (Interstate) 75 outside of the Perimeter, and yet it's still stop and go. At a certain point, we have to realize that every lane you add is diminishing return. One four-lane highway actually has less carrying capacity than two two-lane highways. I'm still familiarizing myself with the state politics, but we've just got to keep impressing on the state and lobbying with the state that certain (roads) have to function, and I think those have to be a priority."

Talk about your philosophy when it comes to planning the future of a city.

"For part of it, I'm very data-driven. I like to see demographics, market studies. I like us to not just start laying out neighborhoods or plotting for growth without knowing there's a market for it. I like to make sure that we plan in the three prongs: that you take care of market, you take care of land use, and you take care of transportation. All three of those are very inter-related. There's been a little bit of worry about, well, is downtown getting all the attention when south Huntsville needs attention, north Huntsville needs attention? You can plan for all of those. I don't think it's a zero-sum game.

"At the core is, in each of those neighborhoods, doing some place-making - helping it develop a deeper sense of identity with an iconic park or an iconic commercial node or an iconic boulevard. I'd always had a hard time getting my head around where Hampton Cove was, and anytime anyone would talk about it, they'd reference the Walmart. To me, it's like, what else can we do as Hampton Cove continues to grow to help them develop an identity beyond a Walmart? What does it mean to live in Hampton Cove, and how can you create a place - whether it's parks or more commercial development - that gives them an identify of their own? If I had a core philosophy, it would be that every neighborhood can and should have its own unique identity, because that makes them healthy and sustainable and safe and marketable."

The word "vibrancy" seems to come up in every discussion about what Huntsville wants to see more of downtown. What would your ideal downtown Huntsville look like 10 years from now?

The current Madison County Courthouse opened in the mid-1960s. (Huntsville Times file photo)

"I think you'd probably see some of the offices on the (Courthouse) Square transition to commercial -- maybe offices upstairs and retail or restaurants or whatever on the ground floor. I would love personally if the courthouse went away. It has structural issues, it has environmental issues. It's not that I have an issue with the architecture; I have an issue more with the context, and that, aside from putting employees out to the restaurants, it doesn't do anything for the Square. It really has the potential to be an iconic, classic Southern square. (The courthouse) is so out of scale. I'd love to see the Square re-purposed. I'd keep it flat open and slap a gazebo in the middle of it - use it for special events, use it for smaller concerts. I think it would feed perfectly into the arts and entertainment district. I'm a financial realist, and don't believe in doing anything that's not fiscally viable, but I think there are plenty of options out there for how we can create a smart, efficient, new municipal complex and open (the Square) up and turn it back into a really great public space."

I understand the city is getting ready to update its master plan for the first time in many years. How is that process going to work, and why should people care about the outcome?

"That was probably one of the first things I noted when I arrived was that the comprehensive plan had not been (updated) since the '60s. Not having an overall vision leads you to do patchwork planning. The comp plan will help us identify problem areas for growth that we may need to address with infrastructure. But it's also an opportunity to go back to the idea of developing civic identity -- for everyone in Huntsville to shape a vision of what the bigger Huntsville is, but also for how their own specific neighborhoods might develop an identity. The biggest part of this - and the mayor pushed it early on - is doing community outreach. He has been very adamant about casting as wide a net as we can to get public input. We're looking at a number of different ways of doing that: traditional workshops, online, go out to a church and do a presentation, show up at Panoply and have a kiosk. Why people should care? This is their community. The folks who live here, we need to know what they feel like the priorities are. Is it a priority to have more things happen in Big Spring Park? Is it a priority to move traffic better on South Parkway? To expand Governors Drive or get a new park out in west Huntsville? We could take a (guess) at those things, but it's better if we hear it from the people."

You live on Monte Sano, which like so many neighborhoods in Huntsville came of age during the space boom of the 1960s. How do you balance investing tax dollars in older, established areas of town versus places like Zierdt Road and Big Cove that are booming today?

"I think you invest in the older ones because it can be a detriment to the city to have those roads falling apart. But, at the same time, you do want to accommodate growth. We should be able to have a strategy both for helping sustain in-town neighborhoods but also accommodating the growth of neighborhoods that are a little more far afield. I think it's especially important as those new neighborhoods come online, that those are planned carefully. It's the ones that are farther from the city center that tend to be a little more vulnerable to disinvestment over time. You want to get in front of that and make sure it doesn't occur. You want to add the amenities and the identities that make those places a little more sustainable."

Huntsville has a large and vocal cycling community that has been pushing the city to add more dedicated bike lanes and other improvements to make it safer to pedal across town. Where does cycling fit into the picture for you when it comes to planning Huntsville's future road network?

Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle (green shirt in center of photo) leads cyclists through downtown during the 2011 Mayor's Bike Ride. (Huntsville Times file photo)

"I think we tend to look at it as cars vs. cyclists, which is not necessarily the way to look at it. We also tend to get stuck in the idea that accommodating bicycles always has to be just carving out a (road) shoulder or dedicating a bike lane. You don't necessarily have to have bikes share that right-of-way, as long as the bicycles can get from point of origin to point of destination. I think a bike network is valuable for a number of reasons. It's an amenity. When you talk about recruiting young professionals to the area, there are a lot of folks who want to be able to do something other than drive. Having a (bike) network that can connect you throughout the city is a potential recruiting tool when you're asking people to come and relocate here. The other thing it does is improve the performance of your road network. Every time you see a guy on a bicycle you should thank him, because that's one less guy in a car in front of you."

The mayor often talks about southeast Limestone County as the city's next growth hotspot - especially if the Sewell farm on Powell Road becomes a TVA megasite for industrial development. How unique is it to have an opportunity to plan and develop nearly 10,000 acres of empty farmland from the ground up?

"It's pretty unique. At this point, really all you want to do is lay out the general framework for how it would develop. How would the street network develop? Where are the land uses? You don't need to get down into the fine-grain design. But it is exciting. It presents challenges. Do we need to set up a second city service center out there because it's so far afield? To me, the biggest challenge is just making sure we coordinate well with the different municipalities - you've got Limestone County, and the City of Madison has land there as well. We want to make sure that what we're doing all dovetails together. If we've got a greenway network, there should be a logical link-up between their greenway network and ours. It'll be fun just watching it happen."

If money was no object, what's the one thing about Huntsville that you would change right away?

Empty seats have become a common site at Huntsville Stars games in aging Joe Davis Stadium. (Huntsville Times file photo)

"A new ballpark would really do wonders for the (Huntsville Stars) franchise. I think it would be just a great thing to have. Let's say you had it on Clinton (Avenue). You'd come down off the Parkway, and there's the Von Braun Center here and the ballpark here, and it's this great gateway into downtown. It's that kind of iconic moment that when people are visiting, they remember. When you drive into Chattanooga and see the bridge and the aquarium spiking over the river, that's the thing that sticks in your head. It has value beyond just the dollars you put into it. It's something that resonates deeper inside us - it moves us and gets us excited.

"It was in the '60s and '70s where the idea became that you put stadiums out on an island (away from downtown), and it collects its own revenue. But you lose that civic connection to it. Part of the problem is that Joe Davis Stadium was built in 1985 - right before you saw the return to that urban model of parks with Camden Yards (in Baltimore). I saw a post on the Imagine Huntsville website with a very legitimate question: 'How do we know anyone even cares about baseball because no one goes to the games?' It's because it's out there (on the Parkway). There's no real ties to it, no real connection to it, it's not as attractive as it could be. Joe Davis just missed the shift towards redeveloping ballparks as part of a larger context. By planting yourself in the middle of a civic situation, you can create a fan base that has this loyalty that is just really, really valuable from a civic standpoint."

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