Residents vote on 'vision'

By James Patrick Schmidt and Justin Mohn

Published Sept. 21, 2007

Transportation

and infrastructure

were voted

important topics.

Not everything in life is about getting the most, and, according to Imagine Columbia's Future co-chairwoman Diane Drainer, last Thursday's Community Choices Open House is one of those things.

"In this process, ACP Consulting wanted to have public meetings to get input for people that maybe were not necessarily able to be in on all the monthly meetings of topic groups," she said. "This public open house was to gather one more perspective. It in no way was an elimination process."

The open house at Stephens College featured posters detailing the 41 subtopics and 128 strategies put forth by the Citizen Topic Groups as part of a process to establish a "vision" for Columbia.

People who attended the open house were given six sticky dots, which they could use to vote for a variety of strategies.

The tally of the stickers was released on the City of Columbia's Web site earlier this week.

The tally showed that some of the more popular strategies included expanding the public-transportation system and filling gaps in routes and times, developing an infrastructure to support emerging technologies and promoting positive attitudes toward economic development.

Drainer said the importance didn't necessarily lie in the rankings.

"All of the 13 topic groups' goals and strategies are important," she said. "We are not looking to rank or prioritize overall any top three, five, 10 projects. It's just another avenue to get information and tally the results."

Drainer said she got the tallies back because she knows people were interested in them, but she's waiting on the final report to come back from the consultant.

"It's not meant to be a quantitative process," she said. "It was more qualitative."

Overall, Drainer said she was pleased with the open house.

"I think what we got was a very good turnout of 470 people that attended the meetings, and I was personally very pleased to see a good turnout from the community," she said.

The consultant for the visioning project will look over the results of the entire process and write a report.

The report is expected to be ready in one to two months.

The visioning committee's next meeting is in October.

Drainer said she is looking to the future.

"Implementation is really the next huge piece of the process," she said.