The City Plan Commission met 09/11/2024. They had one item on the agenda which was a request to approve the Public Participation Plan for the upcoming update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan.
The Commission voted unanimously to recommend the item for approval.
I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion for download:
State statue 66.1001(4) requires cities that are updating their comprehensive plans to create “procedures that are designed to foster public participation […] in every state of the preparation of a comprehensive plan.”
As a result, city staff put together a document providing general guidelines on how they planned to gather feedback with the attention that the Comprehensive Plan Advisory Group would provide further assistance in refining and implementing the public participation plan.
The work on updating the city’s Comprehensive Plan was scheduled to start sometime in November or early December and was expected to take 12-18 months to complete.
Principal Planner Linsey Smith spoke to the City Plan Commission and highlighted some of the engagement opportunities they were working through.
- They intended to create a Comprehensive Plan Advisory Group that would represent various community stakeholders.
- The comprehensive plan includes three Subarea Corridors consisting of South Oneida Street, Wisconsin Avenue, and the area by North Richmond Street and Northland Avenue. They would have stakeholder focus groups pertaining to each of those three subareas.
- Throughout the comprehensive plan update process, they would offer various feedback opportunities including stakeholder interviews, pop-up events at community events, and an online survey.
Ms. Smith noted that the item before the commission was a framework for public participation but changes could be implemented as they started working through the projects if they saw that they were not hearing from all voices within the community.
She was asked what the process was for identifying stakeholders. She responded that they were going to use the equitable engagement toolkit that had been developed by the East Central Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission. “As part of that toolkit within there, we actually look at our existing demographics of our community, and so based on that, we ensure that we’re hitting all those different demographics.”
She was also asked if there was a plan to track the metrics around engagement and what demographic groups they were talking it.
Ms. Smith said that at public meetings and open houses they have a sign in sheet. They would not get specific demographics about the participants but they would know what neighborhoods in the city they were receiving feedback ground. The online surveys might ask for more information beyond the area of the city a person lived in such as what their age was.
Commissioner Adrienne Palm encouraged those directing the process to think about collecting not just quantitative information but also qualitative information.
Mayor Woodford noted that the Housing Tasked Force had come up with strategies to reach parts of the community they weren’t hearing from organically, and that was something they wanted to do during the Comprehensive Plan Update process as well.
Commissioner Palm said, “I think it’s really easy for us to focus a lot on digital outreach and communications and email and getting things out online and on social media platforms and things of that nature, and it’s a great way to connect with people in the community. But I think there are still large parts of the community, elderly community, and other communities, particularly like economically diverse communities that reaching them is a much more manual process, and making sure that we’re getting, like, physical representation and announcements up as well in the spaces where people go in real life for those that we miss with the online footprint. So that would just be my other suggestion.”
Ms. Smith said that part of engaging with stakeholder groups and organizations was getting them to go back to the populations and neighborhoods they represented so that they could gather feedback from them.
The commission voted unanimously to approve the public participation plan related to the upcoming update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan.
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1220796&GUID=3B80ECEB-BF0C-4EF0-89CD-5C563FCF72A1
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