By Wesley LeBlanc

Staff Writer

ORANGE PARK – The town’s new Visioning Committee met for the first time last Thursday night to review the committee’s goals and go over some of the larger problems stunting the future of the town.

The Orange Park Town Council hired Haskell Architects and Engineers on a $115,000 contract to create a report due next year that will plan out the town’s future to the year 2040. The town is using a special grant to help cover $40,000 of the total cost – the town paid the remaining $75,000. Since the grant runs out on May 29, the town hopes soon to have the deliverable report completed. The committee used their first meeting to go over the major goals leading up to that day.

“May 29 is when the grant is done so we have to have the report completed and on file in the town’s hands at that time,” Haskell representative Chris Flagg said. “That’s a relatively compact schedule for the level of effort that we have.”

Flagg said because of the shorter timeline, he and the Haskell staff, as well as the entire visioning committee made up of 20 Orange Park citizens, will hit the ground running hard in the new year. In the meantime, Haskell will focus on gathering knowledge about the town’s infrastructure, issues, zoning and utilities.

Flagg explained Haskell’s five deliverable goals to get everyone up to speed. Haskell will perform an assessment of current capabilities and needs in the first month. This includes things like public safety, infrastructure adequacy and future land use.

The next step in the process includes an extensive review of capital budgets, capital review plans and other town assessments.

“We’re looking to find out what has already been done in town,” Flagg said.

After the first two steps, the town will seek public staff input through surveys, committees and public town meetings. A strength, weakness, opportunities and threat test, or a Strengths. Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats analysis, will be performed next.

“Here, we’ll ask ‘what are our opportunities?’” Flagg said. “What do we want to be? What’s the heart of why we’re here? Why do we return to our town?”

The final deliverable for Haskell and the visioning committee is the actual strategic vision 2040 report. Flagg said predicting everything that’s going to happen between now and 2040 is a wild guess, but that the visioning report will narrow down. He suggested revisiting the report every five years to update it accordingly.

Haskell then turned the meeting over to the visioning committee and allowed representatives from all 11 Orange Park districts to name some of their most-pressing problems. These problems ranged from the lack of walkability in the town to a lack of public access to the town’s two major waterways, Doctors Inlet Lake and the St. Johns River.

Other issues raised included public safety, especially when walking at night, a lack of identity and an inability to attract a younger demographic to the town. The committee agreed Orange Park currently isn’t viewed as a destination, but more of a passthrough to Fleming Island or Interstate 295.

“You pick up everything you need outside and then you come here, to home,” District 6 representative Marina Matthews said. “I would like to see Orange Park become what I’ve seen it as my entire life: a destination.”