Mountain Brook City Council hears update on Village Circle project

The members of the Mountain Brook Board of Landscape Design (BLD) — along with some local and national experts — are working to give Village Circle, located in the heart of Mountain Brook Village, a fresh look.

With the help of city funding and private donations, the BLD is having those experts study design and landscape options for the iconic site.

Those options include introducing native plants and combining two city-owned traffic islands on Cahaba Road in front of Realty South and Gilchrist.

Work on the study began in October and is progressing nicely, said Sim Johnson, the chair of the BLD, when he offered a project update to the members of the Mountain Brook City Council at their regular meeting for Monday, Jan. 25, which was held via teleconference.

“We are now kind of finalizing the conceptual designs that will be presented to the city council and city officials within the next month or two,” Johnson told the council.

The Village Circle project will take advantage of what is likely the permanent closure of Canterbury Road at Cahaba Road.

However, that closure is not due to the Village Circle project, but rather traffic concerns created by the planned construction of two traffic roundabouts near U.S. 280.

“We want to be prepared in the event that the road is permanently closed to make the best use of that space,” Johnson told the council.

The lead firm in the study is The Olin Studio, a famed landscape architecture firm based in Philadelphia. Olin is developing the conceptual design options for the project.

Olin is working to create “a good scheme, a good concept, for Village Circle as a whole,” Johnson said. 

For example, connecting the traffic islands could create “a very large island that can potentially be used as a kind of pocket park,” Johnson said.

A local firm, Nimrod Long and Associates, is working with Olin on the study,

The team lead for the planting design is Landau Design + Technology in Philadelphia. The local expert is Al Schotz, a botanist from Auburn University.

They are seeking to determine “the optimal plant composition to go along with the potential paths and benches and seating areas that might be proposed by Olin,” Johnson said.

They are working to “create a database of plants that are native to Mountain Brook that are commercially available and are being sold in our area, and that do well in this site,” Johnson said.

That database is largely complete, he said.

The city last fall agreed to pay Olin their fee of $16,500, and the BLD raised another $45,000 from private donors to pay the other consultants.

Johnson said he hopes that Olin’s designs will be ready by the time of the next meeting of the BLD in February.

During his presentation, Johnson suggested to Councillor Alice Womack that the BLD and the Village Design Review Committee (VDR) hold a joint meeting to review the designs. Womack serves as council liaison to the VDR.

Johnson and City Council President Virginia Smith suggested that Ronnie Vaughn, the city’s director of public works, and City Manager Sam Gaston attend, as well.

The designs, “after some feedback and a little cleanup,” could then be presented to the city, Johnson said.

Johnson told the council in December that organizers would need to raise $10,000 to $15,000 to pay for a traffic engineer to determine the safety of any plan to change the traffic islands.

On Monday, he said that he is talking to Sain & Associates of Birmingham about doing the traffic study. 

“We are now getting the terms largely agreed upon, including the scope of work,” he said.

“Part of the proposal is putting in some plantings that would be higher than the current mowed lawn and maybe adding some crosswalks to some of the islands,” he said.

It would need to be safe for people driving and people walking around the islands, he said.

The BLD voted unanimously to recommend that the City Council authorize the contract, but it is not ready to present to the council, Johnson said.

He hopes to have it ready by Feb. 8

“We are in really great shape,” Johnson said about the project. “We are ahead of the game, so if the city makes a decision to permanently close Canterbury Road, the public will be impressed about the city being forward thinking about the best use for the site.”

He also provided a tentative timetable for the project. Revisions to the plan will continue this spring and part of the summer.

Organizers hope to have “construction-ready plans with funding in place to install either before the holidays, so as not to disrupt shop traffic, or after the holidays,” he said.

For more information or to make a donation to the construction phase of the project, contact simeonjohnson@msn.com.

The next regular meeting of the City Council is February 8, 2021, at 7 p.m.