The State College Borough Council held a meeting last night for the first steps in the Urban Village revitalization plan.

For the first time, the consultant for the project, Delta/EDSA Inc., met with council members as well as local residents to discuss the plan for the neighborhood.

The Borough Council hopes to revitalize the Urban Village neighborhood, citing aging and deteriorating buildings as a reason for bringing change to the area.

"The Urban Village is the closest thing we have to a slum [in State College]," State College Mayor Bill Welch said. "We are dealing with aging building stock in that area."

The neighborhood stretches from west of Atherton Street and is bordered on the north by the newly developed west campus and on the south by Calder Way and downtown State College.

This meeting marked the first stage in phases one and two of the revitalization plan, which will end in about four months. The entire plan for the neighborhood includes a third phase, the discussions for which will begin after the first two are complete.

By January, the consultants said they hope to have a definitive plan for the neighborhood in place. However, they said that the university's winter break could prevent them from getting as much input from Penn State as they would like by that time.

Borough Council member Tom Daubert said he did not think that would be a problem.

"The university goes a week longer [into December] than they have in a long time," Daubert said to the consultants. "That is to your advantage."

The Delta Development Group representatives said they are going to try to understand the neighborhood to the best of their ability.

"We are going to have to make an effort to really understand the Urban Village," said Karen Dickinson, project manager and associate for the Delta Group.

Keith Weaver, associate principal of urban design and planning for EDSA Inc., said that understanding the neighborhood is very important to the company and they have taken the necessary steps to do so.

"We walk the neighborhood," Weaver said. "We have taken 200 to 300 photos. We have no preconceived ideas of what the neighborhood should be and we will continue to walk the field, this is not just a one-time thing."

He added the company is also interested in what Penn State hopes the neighborhood will become.

"We are equally interested in the university's plan for west campus and trying to blend that in," Weaver said.

Weaver also said that EDSA Inc. will "absolutely" consider the 1.5 acres of land located on North Atherton Street that was recently purchased by Penn State in their plans for Urban Village.

Carl Hess, borough planning director, said the land recently acquired by Penn State would have been considered even if the university had not purchased it.

"The property is a redevelopment site regardless of who owns it," Hess said.

Dickinson said public input will be a very important part of the process, which will include discussions with property owners and residents of the Urban Village neighborhood.

"It's important to hear what the public likes and dislikes," Dickinson said. "We will work with the borough to get the word out."

Borough Council member Elizabeth Goreham said public input is important.

"We want people to feel this is a dialogue," she said.

Weaver said when the time comes EDSA Inc. will carefully piece the final plan together.

"We will take the best ideas from all the plans and blend them into a final plan. We will throw out the dislikes and keep the likes," he said.

Art Heim, senior associate for economic development and planning for the Delta Group also said community input was crucial to the process.

"We want as much understanding of the community's input as possible," he said.

There was also a discussion of a possible name change for the Urban Village neighborhood.

"How about coming up with a new name for the area," Welch said. "The [name] Urban Village represents a failed vision for the area. It was cooked up in the early '90s with the goal of creating Boalsburg in the heart of State College. I'd like something more neutral, we could take a lesson from SoHo and make it NoCo - north of State College."

Although a goal of the Borough Council is to increase the tax base of the borough by bringing in more permanent housing to the Urban Village neighborhood, Welch said the objective was to not drive out students.

"Our goal is to have more and better student housing," he said.

The area is currently comprised almost entirely of students.

Council members said another primary goal is to increase housing diversity by bringing housing for low-income residents to the neighborhood, and many community members expressed agreement with this idea.

Council member Don Hahn also said he hopes the phrase "eminent domain" does not get thrown around in the revitalization process.

"A lot of this development has to have the consensus of property owners," Hahn said, adding that using eminent domain would not get any support from those property owners.

Using eminent domain would allow the borough to evict residents in order to use their property however they pleased.

Borough manager Tom Fountaine said the next step in this process would be to create a steering committee that would work with the contractors and provide insight throughout the plan.

Fountaine said the steering committee would be comprised of Borough Council members, the State College Planning Commission, representatives from Penn State, property owners in the Urban Village and members of the Off-campus Student Union.