Main Street Milton will host a “watch party” of the CivicCon Series hosted by the Studer Community Institute and the Pensacola News Journal at the Main Street Event Center, 5256 Alabama St., Milton. 

Using the Pensacola News Journal’s Facebook Live feed, citizens in Milton can watch the simulcast together at the Main Street Event Center.

Great cities begin with civic dialogue. That’s the bottom line of CivicCon, a year-long project to strengthen communities as great places to live, invest, grow and prosper. The joint project is a series of public town halls and workshops with the nation’s leading thinkers and experts who will share their expertise on what it takes to build strong communities.

These public engagements will be accompanied by stories, videos, podcasts and roundtable discussions that explores how to turn those ideas into reality and strengthen our city.  Please visit www.pnj.com/topic/CivicCon/ for details about the series, including speaker bios, upcoming events, and focused reporting on the issued explored by CivicCon expert speakers.

“I am excited by this new opportunity to expand the reach of CivicCon into neighboring communities.  We recognize that not everyone can make it to Pensacola for the series, but this information is pertinent to everyone.  We welcome the citizens of Milton who will be watching and engaging at the Event Center” said Quint Studer, president and CEO of the Studer Family of Companies

 “I love to see such an engaged community,” said PNJ Executive Editor Lisa Nellessen Savage. “Through CivicCon, we hope to start the conversations and provide the tools that communities need to make decisions in their own back yard that are in the best interests of their own residents. Coming together like this is a great way to gauge what community members want for their neighborhoods.”

All presentations are free and open to the public.  Below is the current schedule, subject to change.

While all live presentations are at the Rex Theatre in downtown Pensacola, they will be televised at the Event Center in Milton.

·       Gena Wirth: Urban waterfronts and coastal resilience, will speak at 6 p.m. Aug. 20

·       Jeff Speck: Walkable cities, will speak at 6 p.m. on Sept. 17

·       James Mackenzie Fallows will speak at 6 p.m. on Sept. 25

·       Donald Shoup: Getting parking right, will speak at 6 p.m. Oct. 9 

·       Ryan Gravel: Infrastructure of people, will speak at 6 p.m. on Nov. 5-6

·       Jay Walljasper: Great neighborhoods, will tentatively speak at 6 p.m. on Dec. 3

The next presentation will be from Gena Wirth, on how to make the most of the urban waterfront.  Ms. Wirth is the Design Principal at SCAPE Landscape Architecture DPC.  She earned a Master of Landscape Architecture and Master of Urban Planning with Distinction from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor’s in Horticulture from the University of Delaware.  Trained in landscape architecture, urban planning and horticulture, she draws from her interdisciplinary training to create ecologically rich and culturally relevant landscapes from the infrastructural scale to the site level.