By Stephen Oravecz

Youngstown residents packed Stambaugh Auditorium Thursday night to learn about the 2010 revitalization plan for their city. Among the 1,300 people in the audience were Warren Mayor Michael O'Brien and Anthony Iannucci, director of the Warren Redevelopment and Planning Corp.

The reason he and Iannucci were there is simple, O'Brien said: Communities in the Mahoning Valley can work together to succeed, or "we can fail individually.''

Despite a long history or competition - which dates back to the days Trumbull County included both cities - Warren and Youngstown are part of the same region. O'Brien said the federal government sees it that way, and state government does, too.

O'Brien said the two cities' histories follow similar courses:

"We started at the same time. We started industrial development at the same time. Unfortunately, the demise of the industrial development began at relatively the same time.

"Their needs and problems mirror ours, and their solutions are our very same solutions.''

There's more to it than parallel destinies, however.

We do not live in the Boardman-Howland area. The Mahoning Valley is the Youngstown-Warren area, as the airport's name reflects.

Like it or not, everyone in this region has a stake in the success of 2010 and in Warren's efforts to revitalize itself. Those are the main cities, but the same holds true for Niles, Girard, Struthers and the smaller cities.

When middle-class people flee the cities, the problems remain - poverty unemployment, crime, older decaying housing. Even though they live in nicer neighborhoods, suburbanites can't really escape the cities. They pay for the crime when their taxes fund the courts and ever bigger jails, and they pay when the poor image of the cities reflects on the whole region and slows economic development.

If that's true, and I think by and large it is, Warren can learn some lessons from Youngstown's plan, which Community Development Director Jay Williams summed up as "a cleaner, greener, better organized Youngstown.''

As O'Brien said, the cities have the same issues, and "Warren can mirror the 2010 playbook to a T.'' That includes things such as the CityScape program, whose goal is to clean up Youngstown's main thoroughfares. The thinking is simple. Nobody wants to move into a town that looks dirty and rundown.

In the two plus decades I've been in Trumbull County, Warren has talked about making its main streets and roads into town more attractive, especially Warren's west side approaches. Yet, West Market Street looks much the same as it did around 1980. The same is true for Niles Road S.W., and Parkman Road N.W. has gotten worse.

Besides mining the Youngs-town plan for specific programs, Warren should mimic the strategy Youngstown used in putting together 2010. Throughout last summer, the city, with the help of Youngstown State University, compiled the plan through as series of 11 meetings in various neighborhoods.

Taking the planning to the people was a critical factor in building the grass-roots support that brought an incredible number of people to Stambaugh Auditorium.

It's a tried and true formula that works.

That is the approach Warren took in 1981, when with the help of Pittsburgh consulting firm Urban Design Associates, it held public meetings to see what people wanted the downtown to be like. Not only did officials get ideas, they built the public support and momentum that led to significant improvements.

In the late 1990s, public involvement from Trumbull 100 and the Rotary spurred development of the Riverwalk and amphitheater.

Now, Warren is attempting to develop another downtown. If the city wants to be successful, it must do more than merely copy programs from 2010. Warren needs to get the public involved in the same way Youngstown did. So far, however, WRAP's efforts seem to be limited to working with downtown business owners. While that is an important constituency, it is not enough.

Youngstown is off to a good start with its 2010 program. It's good O'Brien can see the similarities, but now Warren needs to get moving.

Oravecz is political editor of the Tribune Chronicle. His e-mail address is soravecz@tribune-chronicle.com.

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