Oak Harbor has set funds aside to reinvigorate a 600-acre downtown area by bringing retail closer to the waterfront, creating design standards and more.

Similar ideas for the Pioneer Way area came forward in the 1990s and 2000s, said Steve Schuller, public works director, at a city council meeting last week. The new effort is in part paid for by a $200,000 grant from the Department of Ecology and $100,000 from the Center for Creative Land Recycling.

More than beautification, Schuller sees an opportunity to address the area’s declining infrastructure.

“This is very serious stuff,” he said. “I really see this as a way of the city over the next decade really deciding how you want to move this redevelopment forward, because there are a lot of positives to it: new housing, new jobs, new economic opportunities, but I’m telling you as the public works director, we need this to be able to redevelop the infrastructure that’s there now after decades of disinvestment, malinvestment, zero investment that now has caught up with us.”

City renderings show a softened shoreline along Bayshore Drive and five-story buildings with storefronts.

The council will address the changes over at least three public workshops, said Norman Wright, a consultant with the Center for Creative Land Recycling, which is an opportunity for the community to field their questions.

“There’s no wrong answers, and the community can care very loudly in these workshops about what they want to see specifically around these somewhat vague notions,” he said.

Some council members recognized immediately how complicated the topic may be.

“Nothing fuels my existential dread like infrastructure discussions,” Mayor Pro Tem Tara Hizon said.

Members of the public agreed. Brad Gluth, whose company owns three acres of the waterfront, dislikes the lack of parking available in the new renderings.

There is also no guarantee they will find businesses to rent out the amount of retail space desired, he said.

“Renting all this new retail that’s desired with discussion with staff, it’s something that we’ll have to subsidize,” he said. “We’ll have to figure out how we can actually fund a project if a wish list is developed from pie in the sky development.”

Lack of parking will be a disadvantage to downtown businesses and will destroy the “nice little town” feel, he said.

“This is not New York,” he said. “It never will be.”

Councilmember James Marrow suggested a solution could be a shuttle to bring people in from a satellite parking lot.

Hizon shared Gluth’s worries about the feel of the town.

“I grew up here,” she said. “I think of Oak Harbor as a small town. We are a quaint, small town. That’s who we are, and we like it that way.”

That said, as the urban center of the county, Oak Harbor is the “big city” of the area.

While most of the commerce on the island must take place within Oak Harbor city limits, she strives to strike a balance between that inevitability and the desired small-town feel.

“My heart literally swelled when I saw the first (rendering),” she said.