The City of Knoxville will host a public meeting on Thursday, July 22, to discuss future projects in the Downtown North Redevelopment Area. The meeting is set for 6 p.m., in the Walnut Room of Regas Restaurant, 318 N. Gay Street, and public comment is welcome.

This meeting is a follow-up to last year's Downtown North streetscape design process that developed a concept plan for improvements to the major road corridors in Downtown North. During that process N. Central Street and N. Gay Street were identified as the priority corridors on which to focus efforts.

Detail design work, following those recommendations, has begun for projects on N. Gay Street from Regas Square to Emory Place. During the meeting on the 22nd the public will have a chance to review and make comments on these plans being prepared by Vaughn & Melton Engineering and Hedstrom Landscape Design. The goal is to finalize the design work this summer and put out to bid this fall.

Also at this meeting city staff will talk about plans to design and implement the projects identified for the N. Central Street corridor. Earlier plans had called for resurfacing the street immediately after utility work was completed and then re-striping new travel patterns on the road. It became clear during the 2009 design process that some physical changes/improvements should be made to N. Central before resurfacing occurred. Detail design for those changes should begin late this summer with construction to follow as money becomes available.

Finally there will be an update on the proposed I-275 Business Park road that will connect Baxter Avenue to 17th Street by connecting Blackstock Road and Marion Street and by improving the existing intersections.