Open Houses Focus on Growth Scenarios for Region
WARREN, Ohio -- Officials involved with two community planning workshops Tuesday are pleased with the input they received from participants, and are looking forward to returning later this year with a suggested outline and steps for achieving the objectives ascertained through the process.
The Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium held open houses at the Raymond John Wean Foundation in Warren and at the Oh Wow! Roger & Gloria Jones Children’s Center for Science & Technology in Youngstown. The workshops featured data and projections compiled as part of the VibrantNEO planning process that envisions possible futures for the region based on various scenarios.
According to Jeff Enderle, NEOSCC manager of communications and community engagement, 66 attended the session in Youngstown, 46 in Warren.
The process examines the region’s future based on four scenarios: If the region’s population and employment remain on the modest growth track, if more rural land is developed and older communities abandoned, if the economy and population grow at robust levels in the next 25 years, and if different steps are taken at the local level with regard to infrastructure and development.
In addition to gathering feedback at the open houses, Hunter Morrison, executive director of the consortium running the VibrantNEO project, said people are encouraged to play the online Imagine MyNEO game and set priorities for the region
“We’re beginning to see some broad patterns in the Imagine MyNEO and in the polling around the high value placed in almost every county of northeast Ohio ranking clean air, water and land as the No. 1 priority,” Morrison said.
“I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the amount of effort given by people who’ve attended these workshops,” he added. “It’s not easy to get the data because it’s pretty robust but people are spending the time.”
The region's current development course is unsustainable, said Chris Thomson, director of regional engagement for the Fund for Our Economic Future. By 2040, the financial condition of the most prosperous county in northeastern Ohio will be worse than the condition of the least prosperous county today, he warned. In the Mahoning Valley, if the current course is continued, government expenses will exceed revenues by 60%.
“Local governments and county government do not have the money they need to provide services and can’t cut their way to a balanced budget,” Thomson said. Townships and small villages and cities likely would have to cut services such as garbage pickup, police protection and even water and sewer. “We can choose to do things differently or we can go broke,” he said.
“A lot of people are aware of the issues the region faces relative to abandonment and the declining population in major urban centers,” commented James Minor of Sasaki Associates Inc., the Massachusetts consulting firm engaged by the consortium to manage community outreach events. The charts presented at the forums aren’t a prediction of the future but “just a way for us to understand and measure the impact of different policy decision on land use in the region,” he said.
“The scenario-planning process is to figure out which policy levers have the biggest impact on changing that pattern to a more positive way that’s fiscally sustainable and also improves quality of life” he added. The focus will be on identifying action items by the end of the year “that we need to embark on so we can actually start to see some of the changes people want to see,” he said.
The “real measure of success in the process” will be the extent to which policy makers take the recommendations that come out of the process and begin to change the way development decisions are made, said Fred Merrill, principal with Sasaki.
“This is a really well presented overview of the primary issues that we’re facing in our county right now and in northeast Ohio,” remarked Paula Leigh-Doyle of Southington, who attended one of the open houses. “The data is surprising in that it presents a fairly grim picture for the possibilities if we don’t change and we just hope that things get better by themselves.”
“I think everyone did a really good job,” said Molly Estes of Braceville. “People need to be more aware of what’s happening. I definitely think the concept is good. People should be more thoughtful about the future and we do have choices about how we envision the future. The tough part is that not everybody shares the same vision”
Molly Toth of Youngstown, administrative coordinator at the YWCA of Warren, was pleased to see more attention paid to the concept of regionalism. She participated in the online tool and found it “very difficult” to set priorities. “It does a really good job of showing you the reality of the situations -- there’s simply not the resources to do everything we want to do,” she said.
Copyright 2013 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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