Columbia seeks vision for city

The committee will begin seeking citizen input for Columbia's future.

By James Patrick Schmidt

Published Oct. 20, 2006

At a meeting Wednesday, Columbia leaders chose two people to help lead the city as it envisions the future.

The Vision Sponsors Council interviewed six candidates for co-chairperson of the Vision Committee. The Sponsors Council chose Mizzou Flagship Council Executive Director Dianne Drainer and Access and Urban Outreach Director Jeffrey Williams.

The Sponsors Council, which is led by Mayor Darwin Hindman, extensively advertised for applications to serve as co-chairperson of the Vision Committee.

"The sponsors council is the preliminary group to get things organized to the point of citizen organization," Hindman said. "The job was basically to pick the co-chairs and to look over the calendar of the overall visioning process and to work with the topic groups."

The Vision Committee is being established in order to solicit citizen feedback about Columbia's future.

"The whole thing is to try and get people's input of what they would like to see the future of Columbia be," Hindman said. "To get organized, put a report out, and give that report to the City Council."

Now that the co-chairpersons of the Vision Council have been chosen, the Sponsors Council will wait for reports from the citizen topic groups.

"Our first charge as co-chairs of the Vision Committee is to start the 15 topic groups," Drainer said. "The way I understand it is that we will have 15 topics, and we, Jeffrey Williams and I, as co-chairs, will select 15 co-facilitators."

Once co-facilitators are selected, the citizen topic groups will meet and discuss their topics in relation to Columbia's future.

"What it will be is taking these topic groups with these facilitators, and the facilitators themselves will develop vision statements," Drainer said.

When the groups finish their individual vision statements, it will be the responsibility of the co-chairpersons to compile them into one large vision statement for Columbia.

"I applaud the city for starting this process because, basically, we need to define what Columbia wants to be in five years, in 10 years, in 20 years," Drainer said.

A focus of the Vision Committee will also be to ensure that a diverse group of people is part of the visioning process.

"In my role as co-chairman of the Vision Committee, with Dianne Drainer, our job is to get as many people involved as possible and to make as many groups in the community aware of the vision process," Williams said.

Aside from the 15 citizen topic groups that will begin meeting in January, there will also be two Big Idea-Gathering meetings. These meetings are set for Nov. 28 and 30, according to a news release from the city. At the meetings, citizen feedback will be gathered to begin the vision plan.

"It's a citizen-driven process to arrive at some consensus of what Columbia should be," Williams said.