ALBANY, Ga. (WALB) - Downtown Albany has a 10-year plan to bring life back to its streets — but some residents say the progress isn’t moving fast enough, and the process isn’t transparent enough.

Cynics often point to all the Albany plans and studies that have been done before.

The plan actually alludes to 17 commissioned plans in the last 30 years.

The city of Albany adopted the plan back in October 2022 with 12 big ideas to bring people back to live, work and play downtown. The city says you can open that plan right now and check projects off the box.

“Oh, mhm, hanging on... Pretty empty. There are some hot spots, some spots that seem to be doing well. I can’t ascertain how they’ve been able to do so well...but pretty empty, pretty empty,” this is how community advocate, Blythe Henderson, describes Downtown Albany.

For decades, Henderson watched this once lively area change. She says what concerns her most isn’t just the empty buildings — it’s the lack of a clear, public process for how money gets awarded.

“Requirements to determine success or failure get stripped away through passing the money through these different boards, and then it all becomes what they call discretionary, which is not illegal. It’s more like participation than process at that point,” Henderson said.

We took those concerns directly to the city. Downtown Manager and Executive Director Lequrica Gaskins says the master plan is the city’s accountability tool — and it’s publicly available for anyone to track.

Gaskins said, “There are over 200 million dollars of projects in our pipeline in downtown Albany right now. That’s unheard of. That is a huge success.”

City Manager Terrell Jacobs says Albany’s approach is unique, built on a public-private partnership model funded in part by roughly $13 million in low-interest loans, and he says the results are starting to show.

“Downtown is like your heart. If your heart is not pumping well, what happens? You experience cardiac arrest. And so that’s the same perspective of downtown. We have to have our downtown beating well,” Jacobs said.

Projects like the St. Nicholas Hotel renovation, the IDP Davis Exchange Building — which will bring 56 residential units downtown, the Albany Museum of Art and the Ritz Theatre and Cultural Center are all currently in the works across the Downtown Districts.

Jacobs said, “We have now a new CID — a community improvement district. That’s going to leverage off of what Downtown does. You see now that we’re looking at some other spaces for our recreational facilities to be revitalized — at the tune of about 45 to 50 million dollars worth of revitalization of those spaces. All that is happening at the aspect of us improving the heart of our city.”

It’s one thing to obtain funding; it’s another to create a destination. Critics of Downtown Albany say there aren’t enough options for entertainment and not enough foot traffic for businesses. They say the measure for success needs to be redefined.

“At this point, we’re defining success on the front end. And again, that brings it down to participation instead of process. I would love to know if they would ever consider redefining success, instead of on the front end. If we redefine it, maybe to a community benefit based on data. We could have a better outcome,” Blythe Henderson, community advocate.

The Downtown Master Plan admits that challenges go beyond investments. Its market analysis states:

To be successful, Albany must simultaneously attract more middle-income homeowners and renter households to live in the study area and expand downtown Albany’s ability to draw customers from a much larger trade area than it has historically. "

Gaskins said, “Success is job creation. Success is taking a building that was crumbling...We’re removing these empty storefronts. We are making and breathing life. We’re creating a sense of place for our community in our downtown.”

The city said it welcomes community engagement and points to that master plan as proof of transparency.

In Part 2 of the State of Downtown Albany Series, WALB is taking a closer look at how another mid-sized Georgia city successfully revitalized its downtown and how that plan compares to Albany’s.

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