For a lifetime, Fresno has dreamed of reviving its aging downtown.
A few years back, the city sent a delegation to Oklahoma City, where big things were happening. A new minor-league ballpark. A riverwalk. A Bass Pro Shops outlet.
The visitors talked to the planning director, John Dugan. They sought his secrets.
Dugan recalled that visit last week as he talked about the job he starts Sept. 1 -- as planning and development director in Fresno.
He is the first outsider to be hired for that post since at least the mid-1970s. And he pledges to bring a clear eye to the city's downtown ambitions, and what is needed to achieve them.
A water taxi boat is seen making its way along the riverwalk near the Southwestern Bell Bricktown Ballpark, the home of the Triple-A Oklahoma Redhawks. John Dugan said he sees similarities between his new job's mission in Fresno and his work in Oklahoma City: "Fresno is very much like Oklahoma City 10 years ago, with visions and goals and cooperation."
John Dugan is Fresno's new director of planning and development.
"This has been my vocation -- moving into cities one after another and assessing what needs to be done," Dugan said.
He left Oklahoma City less than two years ago to become deputy planning director in Los Angeles. He took that job at least partly to create plans for 13 of the city's communities. But the recession stole his budget. So he is moving on -- again.
His new boss, City Manager Andy Souza, fairly gushes about what he thinks Fresno has accomplished by hiring this outsider for a $150,000 salary.
"What we have now is ... a quarterback who's won a Super Bowl," Souza said. "He's lived the experience of rebirthing a downtown."
At 62, Dugan is one year older than the man he is replacing, Nick Yovino, who retired last September after more than eight years as director and 37 years with the city. But Dugan said he's not a short-term hire. For one thing, all those years of changing jobs left his retirement funds shaky.
Besides, he added, "I don't want to retire."
Prior to Los Angeles and Oklahoma City, Dugan's résumé lists stops in Topeka, Kan.; Washington, D.C.; Norfolk, Va.; Aurora, Colo.; Sonoma County; Loudoun County, Va.; Memphis, Tenn.; and St. Louis County, Mo.
The seven years he spent in Oklahoma City was his longest tenure among them. There, he walked into an enviable situation. A sales tax approved in 1993 paid for $350 million in public construction downtown, including the ballpark, a trolley, a new library, a sports arena that now houses the NBA's Oklahoma City Thunder, and improvements to the convention center and music hall. Through it all snakes a man-made canal, complete with tour boats.
Dugan said his job was to help the city attract new private development to capitalize on the public investments.
"We had to change the city code, plans and policies to make that happen," he said.
A 2003 study said the resulting private building boom amounted to more than $2 billion. Dugan said it has now reached $3.5 billion.
It includes some things that Fresno has longed for, such as the Bass Pro Shops outlet that once was envisioned as a centerpiece for the now-abandoned Forest City project south of Chukchansi Park. It also included housing.
"There hadn't been a new house built downtown in 30 years," Dugan said. Now, Oklahoma City has more than 4,000 new townhouses, apartments and condos downtown.
Fresno's housing efforts have been nowhere near that successful. For example, all of the new or rehabilitated apartments built or even just planned in the Uptown area since 2006 amount to only 245 units. But Dugan says that's how it started in Oklahoma City, as well.
"There were a couple of hundred initially, but then it just blossomed," he said.
Dugan won't be the only city official focusing on downtown. Craig Scharton, director of the newly formed Downtown and Community Revitalization Department, has been on board since the beginning of the year. But Souza said the two men's jobs will complement each other, not overlap.
"Craig is looking at the nuts and bolts of businesses, of getting things happening," he said. "John is going to be a great resource for the planning and the actual code and development and zoning side."
Dugan said he sees similarities between his new job's mission and his work in Oklahoma: "Fresno is very much like Oklahoma City 10 years ago, with visions and goals and cooperation."
But there are also differences.
Council Member Larry Westerlund was part of the Fresno delegation that visited Oklahoma City. He recalls asking a lot of questions about the canal and riverwalk -- especially its costs.
Not much later, Westerlund led a successful effort to kill the idea of replicating it here.
"It worked for them, mostly," he said. "It didn't make sense for Fresno."
As for all of the other improvements in Oklahoma City's downtown? Westerlund isn't ready to embrace them either. At least not now.
"Maybe someday, in better times, it is something we could consider."
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