Last week a total of about 500 people attended three Grand Vision scenario planning workshops in the Traverse City area. They looked at three small parts of our region: downtown Traverse City, Interlochen, and Acme. When it was all over, The Grand Vision consultant team had collected more than 60 maps from workshop participants, who were asked to offer ideas about the location and types of buildings they would like to see on specific property parcels on very detailed maps.
By now I’ve served as a table facilitator at three of the first four workshops, counting the kickoff workshop last October. The job is easy: I help participants understand and complete the mapping exercise. It felt like a cross between elementary school teacher and traffic cop as people figured out the maps and the meaning of the sticker icons they were supposed to put down on them. The stickers represented future buildings, and it was fascinating as folks politely navigated the delicate issue of placing, say, a big, fat brown chip representing a 10-story building in someone else’s neighborhood.
Sure—it was messy and at times even a little combative as strangers and neighbors discussed future development patterns. But this was democracy in action, and couldn’t be further from the notorious smoke-filled back room deals where community decisions are made by a small group of good old boys.
One of the tables at the Acme workshop was a perfect microcosm of the debate that has been going on in that community about how to develop a town center in the face of a proposal for a mega-mall with big-box stores.
I’ve been a planner in this region for nearly 20 years, and I’ve participated in many local government meetings where frustrated citizens try to understand how new developments get proposed and approved. Where’s the predictability? Who’s coordinating all this growth? Isn’t anybody looking at the big picture?
The result of Michigan’s addiction to local control of land use decision making is that no one is looking at the big picture. Local government officials typically bristle at—and ignore—any suggestions that they should cede any control to a larger regional authority.
The Grand Vision scenario planning process meets that problem in a unique way: It puts the one group that local elected officials cannot ignore in charge of the big picture—the public. These mapping workshops are providing the raw data for developing alternative future growth scenarios for the six-county region. All of the marks on those maps will be digitized and run through a computer model as a possible future scenario. And by June it will be the public that selects a final growth strategy, not some guys in a back room somewhere.
How much more democratic can it get?