Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 25, 1993 TAG: 9304230451
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
And that's not always a pretty sight.
The first step in creating a vision - a coherent strategy on how a community wants to evolve - is to figure out its strengths and weaknesses and the economic and demographic forces that are re-shaping the place.
Most of all, urban policy analysts say, that must be done in a public way so everyone learns what's at stake.
\ Step 1: Find out what citizens think.
Many places that embark on a formal "vision" process do so with community meetings intended to get people talking about what they'd like to see their hometown become.
"When people talk about a community, usually they talk about what they don't want to see happen or why is it nothing's happening," says Glen Hiemstra, a Redmond, Wash., futurist who has run such community forums. "Rarely do people talk about what they want to see happen."
When they're invited to do so, though, the results may be surprising. "Local officials were flabbergasted that we got people to show up," says Mark Kidder, the Chamber of Commerce director who headed the community vision search in Lorain, Ohio.
They shouldn't have been: Cities that open up their vision planning to the public typically find that citizens have a lot on their mind, says Bob Matson of the University of Virginia's Center for Public Service, who has worked on vision programs in Virginia cities.
At heart, these are old-fashioned town meetings, but some have a high-tech twist. Roanoke was considered innovative during its Design '79 exercise 15 years ago when it sponsored call-in television shows to ask citizens what should be done about downtown.
Nowadays, citizens showing up at "vision" forums around the country are given what look like the remote-control device for a television. These allow the meeting's moderator to ask a series of multiple choice questions - What is the most pressing issue in this community? 1. Jobs. 2. Roads. 3. Schools. 4. Crime. 5. Recreation. 6. Other - and let participants punch in answers. The results are computed and flashed on a screen. "You'll see the oohs and ahhs as people see how their opinions compare," Hiemstra says.
That's the idea: People can find out right away how many others agree with them. Sometimes, Hiemstra says, the most outspoken people at such meetings are surprised to find that they're in the minority on many issues.
That realization, he says, tends to speed up consensus building that's essential in creating a community vision. In effect, this is the "electronic town hall" idea that Ross Perot talked about during last year's presidential campaign.
\ Step 2: A scientific self-analysis.
Seeking people's opinions is only the first step. Finding out the facts - in the form of crunching the numbers on a community's economic data and social trends - is the other.
That's something communities usually must hire someone to do. But urban policy analysts urge that it, too, be well-publicized, although the immediate findings may not please some citizens.
For instance, when Lorain, Ohio, embarked on such a process, its consultant produced a 37-page booklet that doesn't read like the sort of document normally embraced by a chamber of commerce.
The report listed assets Lorain enjoyed - its industrial base, its proximity to Cleveland, its relatively low cost of living. The report also laid out in painful detail the community's liabilities: "The county's three most important liabilities . . . are the thinness of its leadership, its failure to develop and retain talent, and pervasively low expectations."
Using that base, the report projected two possible futures for Lorain.
One was an "autopilot future" of what would happen if the community sat back and let nature take its course - an older population, slow employment growth, incomes lagging behind the nation, the community's "talent drain" continuing.
The other was a "preferable future" that the community might be able to create.
\ List general goals - and specific ways to accomplish them.
A vision plan usually starts with a series of mom-and-apple-pie statements about what a community wants to become. We want safer neighborhoods. However, urban policy analysts say, the best plans include the specifics of how to make those general goals happen, and the specifics might not be so easy to agree upon. We'll hire 100 more police officers. In cities that have grown so fast they're disoriented, the search for a vision to get them back on course leads primarily to discussion of quality-of-life issues. Traffic, parks, safety. In smaller cities struggling to gear up growth, such as Roanoke, vision usually conflates to economic development.
If the goal is the creation of more jobs, urban policy analysts say, the community's vision needs to lay out specifically what type of jobs it's going after - and how.
That's why urban policy analysts say the participation of the public and elected officials is so crucial, so they'll buy into the program and be ready to support the projects needed to make the vision a reality.
by CNB