Planning Process Overhaul Needed To Reduce Missteps

If Vision Spokane were up and running and fully functioning, Tidyman’s wouldn’t have tried to plunk down a shopping center in East Central Spokane without first talking to the neighbors.

City parks officials wouldn’t have wasted $100,000 hiring a Florida firm to redesign Manito Park, so inflaming loyal fans of Manito that it took $20,000 for another consultant to help put out the fire.

The Wall Street trolley and pedestrian mall would have operated during the shopping season last Christmas, instead of being sidetracked by a parkrelated public/private tiff.

And a mistake-riddled, two-story bus depot in the heart of downtown that was to cost $12 million but now tops $20 million and is still climbing, would never have been begun.

And the list could go on an on.

So what makes Vision Spokane a magic cure for costly blunders in project planning and development?

It is a new way of community visioning, planning, consensus building and decision making from the bottom up.

It begins with the developers, business interests, city planners, community groups, interest groups, neighborhoods, all contributing to the conceptualization and planning process from the start.

This is the exact opposite of traditional top-down decision making. Developers and the power elite typically have felt no obligation to consult the citizenry in planning major projects impinging on the public domain.

After these movers and shakers make up their minds among themselves, their minions shepherd the plans through channels, aided by political power brokers and puppets in government. Then the finished product is trotted out at a public hearing.

Take it or leave it.

So, you may well ask, why would the elite want to share power now with the general public, after having things their own way all this time?

Simply because the old ways don’t work anymore. They are unreliable. Counterproductive. Costly for business leaders and developers who invest heavily in planning and preparation, with little assurance projects can actually be completed.

More and more, after all the expensive prepackaging, the public response is: Forget it.

One need look no further than the examples above of stalled and failed and fumbled projects, and the waste of money and effort and time and ideas.

What to do?

Well, the steering committee of Vision Spokane has been working on a model of bottom-up consensusdriven decision making about a year.

Now they are looking for a buy-in by the business community, the power elite, neighborhoods groups, special interests, non-profit organizations, etc.

Vision Spokane is an outgrowth of a survey and study conducted by a consultant for a group of civic volunteers called Momentum Advocates, which basically said top-down planning is dead.

So about this time a year ago, Vision Spokane embarked on a series of public experiments in bottomup planning. A day in a Vision Spokane workshop with 100 others last March made a convert of me, by nature a resolute cynic in such matters.

Over a period of several months, a model of how such a process can work gradually evolved. It is being published in a report that will be distributed to 1,000-plus participants.

But all this has been a dress rehearsal for actual communitywide visioning and planning. And whether it even materializes is yet to be seen.

Currently, leaders of Vision Spokane are interviewing a cross section of community leaders to ascertain if there is sufficient interest and support for the project to proceed.

“We’re not looking for money yet,” says Bart Haggin, a teacher and environmental activist who heads the Vision Spokane steering committee as chief facilitator, chairman to most organizations.

First, the steering committee is looking for half a dozen or so organizations spanning a cross section of interests to serve as sponsors.

“The next step will be to establish a management organization and funding plan,” he says.

To succeed, the organization must make good an absolute guarantee of neutrality on issues.

“Everyone emphasizes the importance of neutrality,” says Haggin. “And everyone keeps telling us, `I wish there was an organization to bring this together.’

“Well,” says the chief facilitator, “Vision Spokane is it. And we’re ready to be embraced.”

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Frank Bartel The Spokesman-Review