As Durango’s population continues to grow, residents try to preserve their city’s heart and soul. The comprehensive plan update process was a critical opportunity to secure a long-term quality of life for the community.
As Durango’s population of 16,000 (with another 6,000 in outlying areas) continues to grow, Durangoans are trying to preserve their city’s heart and soul and avoid the "anyplace syndrome" that they see creeping into neighboring communities and the region as a whole. Residents see the comprehensive plan update process as a critical opportunity to secure a long-term quality of life for the community, holding onto what’s best about their community while envisioning and encouraging positive change.
The Orton Family Foundation and its partners assisted Durango in articulating and implementing a shared vision for growth as part of the city’s updating of its comprehensive plan. The Project employed CommunityViz in tandem with keypad polling to allow residents to visualize, analyze and choose between alternative growth scenarios in the context of a collaborative public process. The Project also helped establish a "learning network" and an online information resource to promote dialogue and help build enduring civic capacity for planning and governance.
The City of Durango Comprehensive Plan Update planning process represented over 24 months of planning and project work. The process was launched at two workshops in March, 2005 when the Sonoran Institute met with over 110 citizens to define community values and vision and to present accurate data about the economic trends in La Plata County. A City Council-appointed Citizens Review Committee (CRC) met regularly to discuss every element of the Comprehensive Plan Update and to agree on recommendations using consensus whenever possible. Throughout the process, there were regular joint meetings of the CRC, the Planning Commission, and the City Council to review work done by the CRC, to converse about the most challenging and controversial issues in the process, and to keep everyone informed. A series of 16 well-attended and publicized community workshops were held, beginning in November of 2005. Each workshop was open to the public and included many ways for citizens to express their concerns and share their opinions using state-of-the-art citizen engagement technology.
In October, 2006, the Foundation and partners used a unique participation process that allowed residents to attend public meetings and use keypad polling to vote on preferred scenarios, while the meetings were simultaneously broadcast over local television stations and viewers at home could vote on the same questions using an online survey. Online survey results were combined with keypad polling results at the end of the meeting and presented back to the audience.
Public engagement processes included growth alternative chip game exercises in which individual groups were asked to allocate various densities and land uses across a map of the City's planning area; educational PowerPoint presentations followed by dialogue with the planning consultants and City staff; real-time CommunityViz impact analyses; interactive and small group exercises; and keypad polling.
Funding for the Durango Comprehensive Plan was provided by the City of Durango which allowed for the actual planning process overseen by consultants of the Planning Works group.
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