Comprehensive Planning Worksession #1: 2-24-16

In order to get some order to move forward, the City Council met 2 hours before the 6:30 City Council meeting on Wednesday night to get a little "Comprehensive Planning 101" work done.
In this meeting we talked about resources we could tap into to make the process go smoothly, identified a few strategies that will be used, and assigned the Council some homework so that we can move forward more effectively... Without any further ado; let's get started!


We started with a summary of what resources we have at our hands:

-IRRRB-- I went with Administrator Roth to Eveleth last Monday for the quarterly IRRRB Board meeting because the City's application for infrastructure assistance funds ($100,000) was up for approval (we got it!) and had the chance to connect with their planning director who informed us that IRRRB is pushing to have all of the cities in the Taconite District re-do their Comprehensive Plans for community resiliency and so they have an idea of what the future will look like in their communities. Thus, each city can apply for up to $20,000 of IRRRB funding to help pay for the process. This is great news and we will be utilizing this resource definitely. Also, the IRRRB has numerous connections with groups that can assist with the planning process as well as a number of recently completed strategic and comprehensive plans for us to reference. Check out Grand Rapids' plan!

-ARDC-- A few of the City Council members also met with the Moving Matters group and other Active Living Steering Committee members on the 24th to discuss possible directions that public policy can take that will assist in increasing public health and active living. Through this meeting we were able to tap into some of the resources that ARDC has available, which could be potentially funding, planning assistance, or other community resources.

-Moving Matters Cook County-- Another great resource, which I mentioned before, is the Moving Matters Cook County group that works out of the Sawtooth Mountain Clinic. This group, with funding from the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota's Center for Prevention, has a proven track record of helping to build useful and effective public comment processes through the Hwy 61 Redesign Project, the Great Place Projects, and many other efforts to promote health and safety in our community. They could provide some funding, some assistance with the process, and some assistance planning and carrying out the planning process itself.

-Our Community Itself-- We have some very talented people in our community that come from a planning background. We also have many people in our community that have essential connections to hard to reach populations of residents that may not know about the planning process or may choose not to engage themselves in it. We have to do everything possible to get AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE to participate in the process. I think that it will be pretty interesting and fun to see what people's ideas are for future management and opportunities for our community!


Taking that last comment to the next level was the idea of creating a Steering Committee to help engage as much of the community as possible in the process. The purpose of creating a Steering Committee would be to assist the City Council in reaching as many demographic groups in the community as possible by selecting those people I mentioned above who have connections in those populations. We also need people for a Steering Committee that understand the planning process and that are willing to do a little work to see it happen effectively. If you are a person who has a knowledge of community planning and have a strong connection to a population in our City, then you should consider being a part of this!


The conversation then moved to some strategy. One strategy that is pretty unanimously used in comprehensive planning is to identify focus groups that will give us useful and representative information for our community. There were some great ideas that came out of this conversation, such as placing someone at the Java Moose in the morning to ask questions and get some feedback, placing someone at the South of the Border Cafe to ask questions and get some feedback, setting up a visit to the High School's Civics or Political Science courses (or equivalent) to get their ideas... If you have any suggestions for focus groups and ways that we can reach them, please let me know!


Another strategy that was discussed was to get full participation from local media resources, such as creating a weekly survey to be put on Boreal's homepage, putting a weekly question in the paper for people to think about and answer, having a weekly question on WTIP or weekly topic... The ideas were very exciting and sounded like they would provide good information for the process. AGAIN, if you have any ideas for good ways to engage the public, please let me know!


Ok, let's get down to brass tacks:

Budget-- How much does one of these plans cost? Well, that depends on what we want to accomplish. Our current Comprehensive Plan, written in the 1990s, doesn't have many/much of the categories/depth required for it to productively serve its purpose (compare it to the Grand Rapids plan).  If we would like a plan that explains the "why" of our ordinances and community direction as well as something that envisions a future Grand Marais that has solved the housing/employment problems that have been identified, it will cost a lot of money because getting people together, getting their feedback, effectively processing that feedback, and creating a plan out of that feedback takes a lot of time and energy.
If we want to fill in the blanks of a template to get some guiding principles down, it won't cost very much at all, but it likely won't be as useful nor will it last very long...
For example: Grand Rapids paid almost $100,000 for their plan. I don't think that we will have to pay THAT much, but other cities of roughly our same size paid around $40,000-$50,000 for their plans. I think that this may be realistic. Considering that $20,000 of that money would come from IRRRB and potentially some more of it from other agencies, I believe this sounds like a pretty good deal.

Timeline-- The City Council has set this as a standing agenda item for its meetings, meaning that we will either have a worksession before City Council meetings to work on it, or it will actually be a part of the Council meeting. With that said, tentatively we would have the ground work done on what we are looking for (you can help with that as well... ALL ideas are welcome!) by April and then we could look more formally at hiring someone to coordinate the process and start putting together steering committees and focus groups and community events in the spring, summer, and fall, while we are compiling information from topics we have already completed. This is very loose right now, but we expect this to be well organized, a little intense, and broken up into topics/categories so that we can effectively deal with it.


It was very clear in our conversation this past Wednesday that the Council is very interested in engaging the history of Grand Marais and the area in this Plan. It is essential that we identify the things that have gotten Grand Marais to the place it is at right now and build on those things. In order to do this, we need to know about the things that have happened in the past that were meaningful or that benefited the community. This is one of the Council's pieces of homework. Another piece of homework is to dig up several citys' Comprehensive Plans and study them, taking notes on things that stand out as working well or that are confusing so that we can incorporate or avoid those things.


In summary, it was very helpful and gave the Council (and hopefully the community!) a jumping off place for these conversations. I can't say enough how important it is for our residents to be involved in this process in whatever way you can. You can show up to a meeting, you can write a letter to City Hall, you can take an online survey, you can take a mail survey, you can have a conversation with someone over a cup of coffee (or a beer!). These are all important!

I look forward to the process and am excited to get to know the people and character of our community better through it!