Tonight, the Ithaca Common Council will hear a debate on the Collegetown Urban Plan and Design Guidelines that consulting team Goody Clancy developed last fall. We applaud the student-lead effort to lobby Common Council and implore students to head downtown tonight to ensure that the student voice be heard.

However, up until this point, we feel this student voice has been misinformed.

The Collegetown Vision Implementation Committee, in its final meeting before an indefinite hiatus, has begun to conclude a master plan that has been a year in the making. Since the moratorium on Collegetown construction went into effect last year to enable consultants to formulate the Collegetown Master Plan, the CVIC — under the direction of Mary Tomlan ’71 (D-3rd Ward) and Svante Myrick ’09 (D-4th Ward) — has been hard at work guiding the planning process.

The result is a master plan that will likely steer the future development of Collegetown. Residents hope that it will improve issues of pedestrian transportation, add mixed-use developments, provide for student parking and open up public spaces.