ThisWeek CW 12/10/2015

http://www.thisweeknews.com/content/stories/canalwinchester/news/2015/12/07/planning-for-the-future-haire-realistic-guidelines-focus-on-what-can-be-done.html

It could cost Canal Winchester up to $100,000 to hire a consultant to help update the city’s planning documents, but it’s something Development Director Lucas Haire believes is important to the community’s future.

The city’s existing community planning documents date back to 1999.

Haire told Canal Winchester City Council at its Nov. 30 meeting the 1999 planning process resulted in the establishment of several planned development districts and a Community Economic Development Area agreement with Violet Township.

“We have our planned districts that have been very successful … but the biggest problem when looking at past planning documents is that most of them are based on data collection but not on implementation,” Haire said. “One of the reasons why comprehensive plans gather dust is that they’re not put together in a realistic setting. If we’re looking at planning, we need to focus on what is implementable.”

Council members asked Haire how they might pull together a cohesive plan with resident input for all aspects of the city.

“The last time we had any citizen input into what people expected from our community or what their goals are was 16 years ago, so that’s way too long,” Councilwoman Bobbie Mershon said. “We need to go back to the citizens and get their input and ideas of what the future of Canal Winchester is.”

City Attorney Gene Hollins said while the planned districts are pretty locked in by legislation and agreements between the city and the various developers, there are areas that might be considered for expansion.

He said the Public Works Department is looking at land to the west and south “where you may want to identify subareas that you need to hook up with the utilities programs so we can decide if we are going to be interested in developing that land or not.”

Haire said he’d recommend that officials begin by focusing on the planning documents already in place for the city’s historic area, and then build off that.

“With an area plan, you get people a lot more motivated and focused in when they can see results and they focus on the implementation and have more buy-in,” Haire said. Then they have ownership of getting it done.

“I suggest the Old Town area, as it’s the best plan we’ve got. It focuses on specific things we can do and says who is responsible for doing them.

“We’ve been doing some of these items piecemeal but we can focus further on this,” he added. “With any development, there’s a public process and so we’ll have focus groups of stakeholders, along with several public-input meetings. The downtown is the identity of the community, so focusing on this, even for people who don’t live down here, you have some ownership of what happens because everyone sees it as what Canal Winchester is.”

Two areas of specific interest brought forward by officials included the possibility of the city becoming responsible for the complex of historic buildings on North High Street and the need for a new community center and municipal building.

“We don’t have the resources to do this in-house with our small staff, so we’ll want to hire out for the planning,” Haire said. ” I’m thinking it’ll be like $90,000 to $100,000. We’re also starting to see a consistent level of growth again, which isn’t explosive, which is good because it allows us to plan for that as well.”

Council asked Haire to come back to them in January with cost estimates from area consultants to complete this planning work.