THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, December 27, 1995 TAG: 9512270065
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ALEX MARSHALL, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
Everyone from bank presidents to convenience store clerks will be invited to a conference this spring to talk about what the city's priorities and central mission should be, say city officials.
The idea is for participants - anyone willing to give up a Saturday - to discuss where the city should be going and then sum up their ideas in a sentence or two.
After this one-day process, smaller groups might continue to work for months, or even years, on more specific priorities such as improving schools or creating jobs.
The goal is to bring together the diverse assortment of interests that make up a city - universities, neighborhoods, companies and nonprofit groups, to name a few - to work for the common good.
At a time when the common wisdom says that global competition is pressuring metropolitan areas to be more competitive, such a process is particularly important in establishing regional purpose and cooperation, supporters of the planned ``vision'' conference say.
The city already has a vision statement that revolves around working to be the cultural and economic hub of Hampton Roads. But Mayor Paul D. Fraim, the chief backer of a citywide conference, said citizens need to come up with their own.
``The community itself has to buy into what it believes the goals and mission of the city should be,'' Fraim said. ``Then, the council can act in a way that is responsive to their direction.''
The fragmentation of the ward system, which separates the city politically into boroughs, makes it particularly important for residents to find common interests and goals, Fraim said.
``The ward system has a lot of pluses, but it does polarize things somewhat, and a citywide visioning process would be a healthy exercise right now,'' Fraim said.
The council discussed the vision conference at a two-day council retreat in Williamsburg last week. The idea was part of a strategy to have the city and region start setting priorities.
At the retreat, the council discussed meeting more regularly with other city councils from Hampton Roads. Such meetings could help the cities build trust to tackle shared issues, such as light-rail lines or water pipelines, more quickly.
One of the cities that pioneered the vision conference was Chattanooga, Tenn.
In the past decade, Chattanooga has grown from an old industrial town with few jobs, bad pollution and a decaying downtown to a city with a revitalized downtown, low unemployment and a series of new, clean industries. A regionwide meeting in the early 1980s helped put the city on this path by breaking down traditional hostility between regions and classes and establishing clear goals, participants said in interviews last year.
Norfolk is patterning its effort after a similar one by the region of Richmond over the last year. The executive director of the regional planning body in Chattanooga moved to Richmond, where he helped organize the process.
That process started last spring and has resulted in groups meeting to discuss transportation, education, jobs, arts and other areas of interest, said one of the participants.
``You're trying to include as many people as possible,'' said Gregory H. Wingfield, president of the Greater Richmond Partnership Inc., and former executive director of Forward Hampton Roads. ``They've had over 1,000 people who have attended these sessions.''
Norfolk expects to come up with a plan for the organizing the meeting, as well as a firm date, in the next 90 days. by CNB