Urban Renewal Plan meeting in Ocean Springs
The debate over the City of Ocean Springs proposed Urban Renewal Plan continues tonight after the city went back to the drawing board.
City leaders will present a new Area 4 map of the Urban Renewal Plan to residents at 6 tonight during a board of alderman meeting at city hall.
The new map removes the controversial residential zoning from the proposal and will be made publicly available for two weeks before being accepted or denied.
Ocean Springs also filed a motion in federal court on November 2nd seeking to dismiss a recent lawsuit filed by Ocean Springs property owners who allege the city denied them due process and violated their constitutional rights by designated their homes as blighted and including them in a proposed area to be redeveloped by the city.
Mayor Kenny Holloway hopes the revised map will eliminate community concerns surrounding urban renewal and says the city has no plans to displace any residents. “Well, some of those homes, we thought they could use some fixing up. Since then, we have gone back to redrawing the map and we took out all the residential portions of Zone 4 of the Urban Renewal Plan. So, everything that’s in there now is commercial zoning. So, all those residents that had an issue with it and had written letters to opt out, they will be out of the Urban Renewal Plan.”
Dana Berliner is a litigation director at the Institute for Justice, the group leading the lawsuit against the city. She said they will contest the city’s motion to dismiss. “So, we filed a lawsuit. The city did file a motion to dismiss. That’s pretty typical for every constitutional lawsuit, and we’re feeling confident about our ability to resist the motion to dismiss, because there a lot of cases that say the city is incorrect, and that designating someone’s home as “slum and blighted” really means something and is something that people need to be able to challenge.”
Mayor Holloway denies allegations that the Area 4 homes were designated ‘blighted’ by the city.
