MOULTRIE, Ga. — Enhancements to Moultrie’s downtown, under consideration for almost two years, begin to get off the ground Tuesday with a groundbreaking for the first project, a pocket park on Second Avenue at First Street Southeast.

“This is the start of something big,” City Manager Pete Dillard said. “… It’s going to transform the appearance of downtown Moultrie dramatically.”

The new park itself won’t: The park will occupy a small area that’s already vacant across from Southwest Georgia Bank, which donated the land to Downtown Moultrie Tomorrow.

All the projects taken together, though, will increase downtown’s greenspace by 40 percent, Moultrie Main Street Director Amy Johnson said, and they will make it more welcoming to families and — organizers hope — new businesses.

Johnson said a strategic planning session of the Downtown Development Authority in 2015 created a list of projects local officials and downtown merchants would like to see in the following five years. The pocket park is the first. Others include:

• Downtown Visitors and Promotions Center centrally located on the Square that will house Main Street offices, meeting facility, public restrooms during special events and retail hours. The goal is to place the center in an unused property.

• Critical enhancements to Second Avenue/South Main Parking Lot: Improve landscape, enclose trash bins, expand parking area to back of First Street properties and enhance walk throughs. Work with existing property owners to accomplish an overall landscape plan.

• Critical enhancements to Second Street Parking Lot: Provide consistent landscape, hardscape, and shaded walkway along back of Second Street, enclose trash bin, and improve water run-off.

• Soft Sculpture/Play Park: Retail research shows that an addition of a family friendly attraction in the middle of a retail and dining district dramatically increases family participation activities and increases retail and dining business.  Softscape sculptures will reflect the area’s agricultural heritage.

• Development of security camera system district: Increasing security cameras will help protect property value, detour crime and enhance confidence, safety and security.

Johnson said all the projects are moving forward, although not all at the same pace. For instance, officials have applied for grants for the security cameras and must wait until those grants are awarded to know if they’ll get the money. Meanwhile, she said, the Colquitt County government has committed to improvements of the Second Street parking lot, which it owns.

The city is also awaiting word on a Community Development Block Grant from the state Department of Community Affairs to fund the enhancements associated with the Second Avenue parking lot. That area includes the former Sportsman Restaurant, a popular gathering place in Moultrie a generation ago. Now the building is in horrible shape, Johnson said: When it rains, water flows out the door.

Plans for the site are shaping up but aren’t in full focus yet. The building will probably be removed, Johnson said. But the Sportsman was an iconic site before it closed in December 2003.

“We want to be able to preserve the memories of what the Sportsman was,” she said, and officials haven’t quite decided how best to do that.

Much of the responsibility for other aspects of the parking lot project will actually fall on the private property owners whose buildings surround the lot. Their buildings will need sprucing up to make the parking lot attractive, Johnson said.

“These private property owners, several of them, have already said, ‘We’re going to do our part,’” she said. “… When you see progress, you see good changes, then you want to do good things too.”

Groundbreaking for the park will be at 11 a.m. Tuesday. The public is invited.