University of Georgia College of Environment and Design professor Jack Crowley has already started work on a downtown Athens master plan, meeting with several interest groups to get their ideas on how downtown should grow.

Lawyers are still putting the finishing touches on a $30,000 contract that will spell out exactly what services Crowley will provide, but that's "not holding us up," Crowley said. "There's a 90 percent chance we'll give you more than is listed, and we're giving you a real cut-rate deal," he told the Athens Downtown Development Authority on Tuesday.

Crowley said he and his team of 15 graduate students is seeking out comments from 60 or 70 groups in addition to holding public hearings down the road. They've already met with the anti-Walmart group People For a Better Athens, the alternative transportation group BikeAthens, residents near the North Oconee River greenway and Dudley Park, downtown property owners and former ADDA Executive Director Joe Burnett, he said. "So far, the input has been extremely positive," he said.

The team is also researching tax maps and walking around downtown to draw accurate, up-to-date "pattern maps" of buildings, residences, retail spaces, entertainment venues and parking that they'll use to identify "distinct clusters" of uses, like the retail stores along Clayton Street, Crowley said. He's also studying past master plans. "We're not reinventing the wheel," he said. "We're finding, in many cases, the wheel is just fine. We just have to clean it up a bit."

For the study's purposes, downtown will be defined as the area bordered by the University of Georgia, Finley Street, the railroad tracks north of downtown and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. The plan will look out to 2030, enough time to let a vision unfold but short enough to feasibly plan for, Crowley said.

Even though voters approved a nine-year sales tax referendum in 2010 that includes funding for downtown infrastructure but leaves little room for new spending until 2020—SPLOST is Athens-Clarke County's main source of funding for capital projects like roads and public facilities—Crowley urged the ADDA to keep moving forward. "The best thing you can do now is develop an outstanding plan that everyone has bought into," he said.

A steering committee ADDA Executive Director Kathryn Lookofsky will appoint in the next week will oversee the master plan. It's expected to take about nine months.