Downtown Milton?
Maybe it’s an idea whose time has come

By Al Levine

For AccessMilton.com

Little did John Howard Payne know he would create the perfect city slogan for Milton when he wrote a song in 1822 for his opera Clari, the Maid of Milan. There’s No Place Like Home is the key refrain of the little ditty entitled Home Sweet Home. A century later, Dorothy boosted the five words to Wikipedia status. After a whacky trip to Oz, she blurted out: “Home! And this is my room - and you are all here! And I'm not going to leave here ever again, because I love you all! And -- Oh, Auntie Em – there’s no place like home.”

While you ponder if Dorothy really talked in exclamation points [it says so at thewizardofoz.org], consider how accurately those words describe Milton.

There’s No Place Like Home. Shouldn’t it be on the Milton official seal, the horse jumping over the letters? What better describes Milton’s prideful, protective approach to its city limits?

There’s No Place Like Home. It could also be appropriately lettered on the doors to City Hall, which, literally, ain’t truly home.

Now in its third year of existence, the city still does official business in leased space at a non-descript office park. Aesthetically, it couldn’t be farther removed from Milton’s horse country and gravel-road roots.

The contradiction is not lost on some residents.

“I agree with this concept of keeping this agrarian society, not letting it become extinct,” said developer J.T. Adams. “It’s wonderful when I’m driving on my way home to see all that open land and 200-year-old trees and the horses and stuff like that.

“But the sort of emotive element of the city itself does not jibe with the emotive element of the governance. In other words, you have this rural paradise, if you will, and then you go into the city center, if you want to call it that, it doesn’t make any sense. The downtown really needs to feel like an old village.”

To that end, Adams has floated an idea to create a downtown Milton, a small village, with a centerpiece government center replicating the Milton County courthouse of 1875.

It would be part of his emerging development of 19th century-inspired buildings, Crabapple Mercantile Exchange, near the historic intersection of Crabapple Road and Birmingham Highway.

But is the time right? Maybe. There’s the rough economy to consider, as well as relocating the town center to a universally convenient location.

City Hall is now located on the southeastern boundary of Milton, off Windward Parkway. The 69-month lease was signed in November 2006.

If you aimed a dart at a Milton map, a bullseye would land near Freemanville and Redd Roads. But that’s not exactly the epicenter of town, all things considered. The bulk of Milton’s population is concentrated in just a couple of spots; farms, larger residential property and open space make up the majority of the area.

A city village is an exciting prospect to folks in Milton but even the community activists are wary of the economic factors.

“I think it’s a long way off,” said Gordon Hunter. “The funny thing about our city is everybody wants to have some nice amenities like traffic improvements and parks and stuff but we don’t really have the revenue base to do much about it. We’re just struggling to keep our heads above water.”

Hunter embraces the idea of a downtown village area but believes the economy will set the timetable, not public sentiment.

“We don’t know how the economic climate is going to affect our city revenues with business and residential taxes, with all the foreclosures and things that are happening in the state and community,” he said.

“I know it’s difficult to look at where we have city hall now and get too sentimental about it. It’s just in an office strip. But I think we just have to be patient and live with what we’ve got for awhile. On the other hand, if the city wanted to float a bond issue or do something to buy some land, this is probably one of the better times to buy the land.”

But what about when things turn around?

“It will be nice to have a little centerpiece somewhere in the city. We’ve got an interesting city. We’ve got a lot of geography that we cover and it’s really hard to pick out an area that would be considered the center of town. Highway 9 is probably our major business center. I would guess that city hall should be somewhere around the Highway 9 corridor. If it’s a bit west, up around Hopewell Road or somewhere like that.”

A new, permanent City Hall will eventually become a reality.

“When we first became a city, we leased space because it was the most cost-effective approach,” councilwoman Julie Zahner Bailey said. “But there’s always been the idea that eventually we’ll identify a more permanent location.”

And that process, like everything in any government, doesn’t happen with much acceleration. But at least Milton has taken care of one of its biggest problems by recently confirming Chris Lagerbloom as city manager and slamming that revolving door to the office.

Lagerbloom said before the city endorses any ideas about a city hall it has to execute a space and needs analysis.

“Until we know what that is, it’s very difficult to say, you know, this place is more desirable than somewhere else,” Lagerbloom said.

A study will reveal “knowing what we need and not just what we anticipate we need today but what we’d need in 10 years, in 15 years, in 20 years.

“You really have one chance to bite that apple,” Lagerbloom said. “You don’t want to build something that all of a sudden in four or five years from now we’ll be saying, uh-oh, now we don’t have a facility that meets our needs.”

Lagerbloom believes city halls are more than just offices where meetings are held and bills are paid.

“City halls are neat facilities for local towns and incorporated areas because they bring you to some sense of home,” he said. “It’s a citizen’s place to interact with their elected officials and their city government and staff. The concept of having a more traditional city hall is a neat concept. I think to make any assumptions that we’ve figured out where this thing was going to be or what size it’s going to be, what it’s going to look like and that we’re ready to start moving computers in, I think that’s lofty.”

He thinks Adams’ idea may be a bit premature.

“To the extent that we haven’t even involved the use of a professional yet to do that space and needs analysis and we haven’t even sought any public input,” Lagerbloom said.

“I definitely want to aim before we shoot.”

In Milton, you don’t put the cart before the horse.

But Adams, along with development partner Ron Wallace, who recently opened the Olde Blind Dog Irish Pub in Adams’ Crabapple Mercantile Exchange, believes the timing is right for the Crabapple idea.

He is an historian and an optimist whose enthusiasm for his projects is difficult to restrain.

Adams researched a photograph of the old Milton County courthouse and discovered it was taken on the only day it snowed on the building in 1882.

Using the scale of people and a dog in the photo, his architects have replicated the building’s precise measurements. It will be built with 150-year-old bricks. He already has the building permit.

The building site is right behind the current buildings at the Mercantile Exchange. Adams foresees three buildings: the courthouse, administrative offices and public safety. The underground utilities and sewer are already in.

Adams is also offering greenspace for a city park that can be used for festivals and a library. He’s offered to re-do the historic intersection as a round-about to ease its traffic problems.

“From the time they approve the plans, we can have the buildings done in 120 days,” Adams said. And the city can choose from several options.

“We can build it, they can build it, they lease it or buy it, we can set it up as a deal where they can get equity in it and eventually buy it through their lease payments, which economically makes good sense, Wallace said.”

Wallace has attended meetings of Milton’s business leaders and heard that they’d like a downtown similar to Roswell’s Canton Street area. He envisions something even nicer than that cluster of restaurants and antique shops, where eventually hungry Miltonians will be able to walk to seven dining options in a couple of minutes.

Adams, who lives in a 200-year-old stagecoach inn in Milton and quotes Thomas Jefferson extensively, believes his developments of historically-themed buildings are more than a connection to the past.

“I believe buildings actually have more than square footage,” Adams said. “They actually speak to not only the current generation but future generations. It lends itself to things such as stability and certainty and a communal type feel. I think that’s what every city strives for, that you have this sense of belonging of its residents. If they don’t feel that sense of belonging then you have strife, you have opposition and otherwise rational and sober people tend to disagree more often than they probably would.

“I don’t want to suggest that some bricks and sticks are going to fix every problem but they do tend to make people feel like there is a purpose, there is a future, there is a sense that things are going to be operating under some normalcy or continuity.”

And, he said, with a laugh, he likes the idea of one-stop shopping for Milton residents.

“The best thing about this [idea] is that people can go into city hall and pay their taxes and then go cry in their beer at the Olde Blind Dog .”