One person said Toledo should increase public transportation options. Another wants the city to fix its crumbling streets. A third suggested repurposing abandoned properties to provide low-income housing.

With the New Year rapidly approaching, many people are making resolutions. Shoppers and employees at Franklin Park Mall on Monday had ideas not just about their New Year’s resolutions but what they think the city of Toledo should be striving for in 2025.

At the top of 18-year-old Jackson Iocoangeli’s list: addressing the city’s abandoned properties.

“There are a lot of places not being used. Either find something to do with them, or clean them up,” the 18-year-old University of Toledo mechanical engineering major said.

Auntie Anne’s assistant manager Tiffany Carroll, 27, agreed. She suggested that some of the extra buildings could be repurposed into low-income housing or schools.

“They have so much potential. They have all of the bare bones. We just need to put a little more money into it,” Ms. Carroll said.

“We have enough restaurants, as much as some people will say otherwise.”

Katie Bida, 20, who hails from Severodonetsk, Ukraine, said she would like to see more options for public transportation.

“I am from Europe, so I need it,” said Ms. Bida, who is a barista at the recently opened Franklin Perk Cafe. In Ukraine, she said, buses would run every few minutes.

“Here, it’s like one every three hours.”

Lauren Mayhugh, a 25-year-old employee at Victoria’s Secret, lives outside of Toledo but commutes to the Franklin Park Mall for work. She said she’d like to see better road conditions in the coming year, especially during bouts of wintry weather.

“There are a lot of times where roads aren’t even salted,” she said.

Potholes can also be a problem, Ms. Mayhugh said, citing an instance a couple of years ago when a pothole near the mall had taken more than a week to fix.

Ms. Mayhugh, along with others who were interviewed, had their own personal New Year’s resolutions.

Ms. Mayhugh, for example, said she’s like to go to school for IT. She’s also planning on learning a new language, something she’s doing with a couple of her co-workers at Victoria’s Secret.

And Mr. Iocoangeli, who recently started college, said he’d like to “be more on top of things” by eating healthier, working out, and seeing more of what Toledo has to offer.

First Published December 31, 2024, 12:06 a.m.