As you may know, Springdale Township joined our Initiative last month, and this Manistee County community has decided to take full advantage of participation by writing its first ever master plan. The process began, as always, with a Visioning Session. It was attended by just over 30 citizens whose top priorities were staying rural, using zoning to control blight, and youth recreation; the full summary is on Springdale’s community page (look under “Springdale Project Documents” on the sidebar). The page also sports a brand-new history feature, so please do stick around and read a little of that too!
A makeup visioning session was also held last week for residents of Arcadia, Blaine, Crystal Lake, Gilmore, and Joyfield Townships who were unable to attend the original sessions in those communities. Arcadia again had the largest turnout at 10 residents, and a pair each from Crystal Lake and Blaine added their voices to this regional collaboration. Those three communities’ Vision Session summaries have been updated to reflect this new input.
And I know we’ve been teasing you with a makeup session for Pleasanton and Bear Lake Townships that will be combined with a first session for Bear Lake Village. It is aaaaaaaaaalmost scheduled, we promise! Our original venue is out of commission due to getting its floors spiffed up, but we think we’ve found an alternative and will let you know just as soon as we can nail it down–maybe even today!
I think if the total number of participants for each township’s visioning session was posted at the beginning of their results, it would lend more weight and significance for those reading the resulting number tallies (i.e if out of 100 participants 25 thought X should happen now we have a percentage).
Thanks for the suggestion, Susan – that WOULD be nice to see! I did put the number of participants in each session in the introduction on each community’s page, so at least we can get some idea of the size, but you’re right that it’s not in the summaries currently. At this early stage, just seeing the rankings has been helpful in determining which issues and priorities float to the top. This is definitely not the end of the number-crunching, though!