The committee tasked with helping develop Washington’s comprehensive plan goals and objectives has completed combing through the objectives and making changes.
The committee, along with Dan Lang, of The Lang Gang Inc., spent the last several workshops discussing each of the six focus group goals and objectives. The draft documents contain about 42 goals and about 140 objectives to meet the goals.
The Lang Gang is the consultant hired by the city to help develop the 20-year plan.
The final focus groups were discussed Thursday, Oct. 25.
Focus groups include aesthetics, civic improvement, land use, transportation/infrastructure, parks/recreation/open space and economic development.
Members looked at and discussed every word in the plan, suggesting additions, deletions and whether or not specific words conveyed the citizens’ best interests.
Lang discussed the importance of the document, as well as the community effort.
“This document has a lot of very good things in it and we’ve spent a lot of time on it,” Lang said, adding that he’d like to see a lot of public comment on the plan.
“While this is a city document, it’s really a community effort. The document doesn’t get done by the city, it can’t. There are too many things that rely upon the private sector,” he said. “I think the community as a whole is going to have to participate in order to (accomplish the goals).”
Next Step
The next step is to host a public participation session.
That session has been scheduled for Thursday, Nov. 15, from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Washington Senior Center.
Citizens will have the opportunity to look at each of the plan objectives and mark on a sheet whether they strongly agree, agree, disagree or strongly disagree with each one.
Lang encouraged all citizens’ to weigh in and stressed the importance of hearing from a cross section of residents, as well as getting input on many issues, rather than one single issue.
For those who are not able to make it to the senior center, the survey will be available online for about one week after the public session.
After the session and the online survey session is closed, Lang will tabulate the results and give each objective a numeric score determining if the public, overall, is in favor of the objectives.
Once the tabulation is complete, the steering committee will meet to discuss the results.
At that meeting, the committee also will discuss the future land use map — the final major element of the plan.
Everything discussed at all of the workshops will be put together to create the comprehensive plan.
A formal public hearing, which will provide a final opportunity for the public to express opinions, is required before the plan is adopted. The hearing will held before the planning and zoning commission, which will be responsible for adopting the plan.
The Washington City Council will pass a resolution in support of the plan prior to it going to the planning and zoning commission.
