This meeting of the Lakewood City Committee of the Whole included a presentation on the Public Art Master Plan and discussion of six proposed charter amendments for the November 2026 ballot. Council approved the minutes of the February 23 meeting, received and filed the public art communication, and referred two charter amendments favorably to full council. The remaining four amendments were kept in committee for further deliberation.
All right, we'll call community of the whole to order. I will first move to approve the minutes of the February 23rd meeting without the necessity of a reading. Second. Motion's been made and seconded. Discussion. Hearing none, all those in favor? Aye. And that motion passes. All right. So first up, we have communication committee regarding the public art master plan. And I see that we have Amanda Kramer here. So thank you for joining us and Director Byington. I will kick it over to you guys. Hi everybody, thank you for having me here tonight to give you a little update on our public art master plan. We've been working with the with the Cuyoga County Planning Commission since the summer on this project. We entered into their community services. Community planning services program for a grant for this, so we were able to get that started in the summer. They actually were able to table at the Lakewood Arts Festival, which is great. A couple members from our public art advisory board, Councilman Evans has been engaged. And Nick from Public Works has been attending as well, trying to keep me in a in a tight tight space. Really trying to understand where we were, where we uh, as they studied a lot of our existing demographics where we had issues with accessibility or equity, um, and just really trying to get a good grasp of where we were. We had are concurrently going through the implementation and the vision and recommendations right now. So they started the vision and recommendations in October, and they're just finishing that up now. And at the same time, we're going through the implementation. The implementation is essentially giving us the tools to make those things happen. So funding strategies, uh partners that we should tap into that we've not tapped into before, things along those lines, and then we are looking for the final plan rollout in late spring this year. Um, as I mentioned, we have had um some engagement since the beginning. We have the this steering committee that we've been working on. The county also met with individual stakeholders, and I'll show you the list of stakeholders here shortly, but um a good group, and then we had a community survey with 800 responses. We you can see in the picture here, we did an engagement at the high school, which was daunting for me, but um actually really nice and really well received. Um we have another one coming up at St. Ed's that we're gonna be going to do the same thing, so that one should be pretty interesting because it's a lot of kids that don't live here. So I'm interested to see their perspective as visitors. Um, and then we were also discussing doing a senior engagement with Barton communities or at Cove just to try to touch those populations that aren't always accounted for or can't always make a public meeting. Then we will do the standard public meeting that everybody's invited to. Uh I believe that they're also going to do an artist round table with some artists that I wasn't able to get to come to our meetings just to see how they felt about our processes, how how things have worked for them, how successful or you know, where they see opportunities. So the input from the steering committee, the steering committee was first and foremost just really wanting to get a more diversified public art program. We you know, we we do great with murals, murals are great, uh, but they wanted to see a little bit of a difference with uh sculptural art, functional art, uh temporary opportunities. You know, we'd love to have traveling art come here, but with the we don't really have a you know a standard of how we would allow that. So that's those were the um the input from there. The public art locations, they like it on the main corridors. There was an interest in seeing it in some more residential areas, maybe like how you know we could have an art tour of everybody who's painted their garage and made it um an artistic piece. The installation of public art has wildly been or generally been pretty successful, but we have had some we do have some issues with the vinyl, it doesn't stay on very well, it's expensive, and we're paying a fabricator, not an artist, uh which is challenging, but it's safer for the brick, but then we can't paint on the brick. So this was kind of some of those things that we wanted to hash out and figure out. Um as I discussed before, we wanted to talk compensation with the artists and make sure there was a standard. Uh right now, I do my best research and come up with some numbers and see how many people apply, and if a lot of people apply, then it seems like we're doing pretty good. But we want to make sure that it's competitive but reasonable and practical within our budget. Um, for maintenance and removal, we also wanted to consider some of you know, we don't have a lifespan on all of our art. We want to know when our art should start to be cycled out, when it is at the end of its life, and we want to be proactive with it instead of uh clamoring to get some maintenance in there, so we don't have a maintenance plan in place for much of our public art right now, but we want to make it a line item in our budget so that it's something that is consistent and addressed every every year. So, this is a group of people that of organizations that met with uh the county, uh, local community institutions, public library, YMCA by Glakewood, etc.