SEMCOG awards Berkley $10,000 to start Dorothea Road project

BERKLEY — The city of Berkley was one of 14 areas that was awarded a grant from the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments for a future project.

SEMCOG recently awarded $482,000 in grants for its Planning Assistance Program. According to SEMCOG, the program “provides funding for planning projects across five priority topics of regional significance and which help move regional plans and priorities forward in Southeast Michigan.”

The five priority topics are transportation and infrastructure equity planning, complete streets and corridor safety planning, trails and greenways planning, stormwater management planning, and placemaking along corridors and active transportation planning. The project for Berkley falls under the placemaking along corridors and active transportation planning topic.

SEMCOG Planning Director Kevin Vettraino stated that the overarching goal of the program is to locally implement policies, actions and regional plans.

“We know in our communities there’s a desire to activate some of our public spaces (and) make them work more for residents for gathering, even closing down streets from car traffic and being pedestrian-only zones or areas where you can have benches or food trucks or just more of that community building along some of our key corridors,” he said.

Berkley received $10,000 to develop conceptual designs for a project on Dorothea Road.

During the city’s master plan planning process a few years ago, Community Development Director for Berkley Kristen Kapelanski said one of the things the community expressed interest in was an urban plaza, or pocket parks, in the downtown.

“(Dorothea Road) just dead ends right into an alleyway and some municipal parking, and it doesn’t really go anywhere,” she said. “The municipal parking that it dead ends into and the alley is accessible off of the side streets on either end. So we’re not closing off any access to anything. It would still be accessible in those areas.”

Kapelanski said they want to have a consultant come in and craft conceptual designs for the project and then have the DDA evaluate what’s the best plan to move forward with.

“We would want to make this as … usable and attractive as we can to many different groups of people,” she said. “We have younger people and older people and families, and we want to come up with some concepts maybe that focus on (how) this is a plaza that includes some elements for children or something like that, this is something that’s maybe more geared towards being easy for the Downtown Development Authority to use for events, and here’s a concept that maybe takes a little bit of both of those.”

Kapelanski said the money will be used to hire the consultant, which she sees happening in the fall. By spring, she hopes a concept will be chosen for the project.

The city plans to look for implementation grants to fund the improvements.