His vision shaped Clovis. After 39 years, the city’s planning director is retiring
Although Dwight Kroll’s physical handprint is not on the buildings or sidewalks of Clovis, his ideas are enshrined in much of what people see in the city today.
Some of his projects began as mere ideas on scratch paper or napkins during council meetings or free time.
Kroll, who has worked as the Clovis city planner for 39 years, officially retired Friday. It is the only job he held after graduating from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and that itself is a rarity since cities tend to change up their city planners.
Councilman Vong Mouanoutoua said Kroll never sought fame for his projects, but knowing that residents use and enjoy the spaces Kroll helped build should be satisfying.
“What Clovis is today, was what (Kroll) imagined it to be as a mere sketch on a napkin,” said the councilman. “His work speaks for itself.”
After retirement, Kroll, 62, plans to marry his fiance and help her raise seven children.
Many of Kroll’s colleagues and coworkers credit him for much of the city’s revitalization success.
“This community was going to grow. And it was going to grow with or without our work,” Kroll said recently, sitting on the steps of a building that imitates a Craftsman-style home, but really hides a sewer pump inside.
That creation is among Kroll’s favorite because the building while serving a public need, will soon blend in with the up and coming master-planned community of Loma Vista, one of the urban villages Clovis began building under Kroll.
He said that during his time in planning how the city would grow, residents told him they wanted to maintain their small-town feeling — but also feel like a big city.
Kroll’s job was to make it the city “a community that people would want to live in 100 years from now.”
Revitalizing city spaces
As Clovis grew from 38,000 people when Kroll began his job to 112,022 in the latest count, there was eventually a needed focus in the older, historical parts of the city.
Old Town Clovis, the city’s downtown, needed a facelift. Kroll decided that while much of new development was happening north of Fifth Street, some ought to occur south of it, too.
Through focus groups with residents and even students at Fresno State, Kroll heard concerns that some people didn’t feel welcome in downtown Clovis due to the lack of cultural diversity and businesses. But he said in reviving the town’s center, new people and businesses have come in.
One of those revival projects was Centennial Plaza. Kroll said it has become an entertainment center for the area, attracting restaurants, coffee shops and still keeping designs that mirror other parts of the city.
“You see a diversity of ages and cultures now coming to old town that weren’t there five years ago,” Kroll said. “It’s not an exact science, but you try to envision something that the greater community will like.”
The fire station in downtown Clovis was among the first projects to revitalize the city’s center south of Fifth Street, Kroll said.
But one of Kroll’s favorite projects was restoring the old Tarpey Depot, a building that once served as a train station when the San Joaquin Valley Railroad connected Fresno to Friant. The building was shipped from southeast Clovis north to downtown and now serves as the city’s visitor center.
The city is a “Gateway to the Sierras” after all.
The community helped to decide what would become of the vintage building. Kroll said that is typical of residents in Clovis — to want to have a say in what gets done in the city.
The city’s future
As he retires, he still envisions a city with much more growing to do. The city’s trail system is perhaps a sign of that, too. Outside the sewer pump house, a garden and park will become a trailhead once the Loma Vista community develops, and 22 miles of trail are installed, Kroll said.
Connecting the urban villages that will be part of the growing and sprawling city of Clovis to the east has been one of Kroll’s last efforts. But it started with residents asking for it. He said while some residents were afraid of having trails run behind their homes, now many want precisely that.
The city’s council and other staff have been supportive of him from the start, Kroll said. He said he credits much of his early success in the job to his first bosses, who made his job easy and made him comfortable since he didn’t know much about the area in the beginning.
“I really didn’t know much about the San Joaquin (Valley) other than it was hot and dry, and foggy and wet — and flat,” he said.
His current, and now former bosses, said Kroll leaves a mark in the city that can be seen everywhere in the city.
“In projects large and small, (Kroll) has had a unique ability to translate our community’s history and values into remarkable and durable plans that define our public spaces and public buildings,” said Clovis councilwoman Lynn Ashbec
