Maitland works on revisioning its downtown

It’s a spring Saturday in 2026. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping. It’s a beautiful day in downtown Maitland. When you turn to your left and your right, what do you see?

Maitland City Council members pulled out their crystal balls on Monday imagining what the future of Maitland’s downtown will look like 10 years from today.

Mayor Dale McDonald sees a bevy of choices for how to spend his Saturday. Events aimed at all ages abound, and there’s a sports bar where he can pull up a chair and watch Gator football with his neighbors.

Councilwoman Joy Goff-Marcil envisions a downtown where she can drop off her teenage children and not worry about their safety. And, she said, she sees a place where walkers and bikers can make their way from the Maitland SunRail station down to the city’s Cultural Corridor without ever needing a car.

Councilwoman Bev Reponen starts her Saturday at an event at the Maitland Art Center, then walks over to a downtown restaurant for lunch. After that she continues her stroll over to the Enzian Theater, or maybe an event at the Audubon Center for Birds of Prey.

“I want it to be so that we’re really having activities that people can spend at least a day here and not have to get in their car and go somewhere else,” she said. “So that the activities are close enough and profound enough to make people want to stay.”

It’s been 13 years since the last update to Maitland’s downtown master plan, and nearly two decades since that master plan was first drafted. The city kicked off the process of bringing its master plan into this decade last month.

On Monday, GAI Community Solutions Group, the company hired by the city to help craft the update, hosted a master planning workshop with the City Council and the Community Redevelopment Advisory Board. Over the next few months, GAI will host similar focus groups with city stakeholders to see what their vision is for downtown Maitland’s future. Next up is the city’s Planning & Zoning Commission, which will meet with GAI representatives on Thursday, April 21.

When Blake Drury, director of planning and urban design for GAI, asked the City Council on Monday what the heart of downtown Maitland is today, Councilmembers floundered at coming up with a specific answer.

“I think the word ‘downtown’ in itself is a bit of a stretch,” Councilman Mike Thomas said when describing the current state of Maitland’s core.

It was just Jeremiah’s before it was torn down, Reponen said. Other than that, she said the Maitland Public Library is the closest thing to a resident hub that Maitland has.

“We haven’t had that place, and that’s kind of what everyone is craving,” she said.

Drury said when he posed that question to Maitland residents at a focus group event last month, many of them said Lake Lily.

McDonald said Maitland residents have become “comfortably miserable” having to drive 10 to 15 minutes to get to the types of places they want to go to gather.

“For the last 50 years, that’s been OK, that’s been good enough. But why should that be good enough?” McDonald asked.

Over the next few months the city and GAI will work on crafting a master plan that aims to get the city beyond “good enough.”

“I really want something that is going to work in the long term,” Reponen said. “… I want something that is appealing to both the people that are presently living here and those that are coming with the buildings that we’re doing… something that is attractive to everyone, not just one specific group.”