Phoenix City Hall’s lobby is bustling with a crowd of people who want to make a difference in their city and reach a common goal in creating a “connected oasis” within this desert city.
Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton, Phoenix City Council and the PlanPHX Leadership Committee hosted a community celebration to unveil the 2015 General Plan at the PlanPHX Summit in City Hall on Saturday.
The General Plan is a policy document that guides growth and redevelopment for the city of Phoenix. Work for the 2015 update started in September 2012, and this is the first update to the General Plan since 2002, said Joshua Bednarek, principal planner on the long-range planning team in Phoenix’s Planning and Development Department.
Each council member hosted at least one meeting in their respective districts, and the PlanPHX Leadership Committee launched a website for feedback while seeing as many groups of people as they could during public meetings, Bednarek said.
“An important part of any city’s growth and development is making sure that the citizens or its residents have a say in what they want their city to be in 10 to 20 years from now,” Bednarek said. “It’s a really good opportunity for us to be on the same page about what do we want to be as a city.”
The PlanPHX Leadership Committee didn’t use any city money, but they received grants from the Arizona Community Foundation and Phoenix IDA to fund the summit, the editing of the plan and an educational effort to train citizens as community leaders who will help implement the plan.
Mo Stein, the PlanPHX Leadership Committee chair, said the committee’s sole duty was to listen to what people had to say, make a direction out of the feedback and create an opportunity to think strategically versus physically about their ideas.
For example, the old 2002 plan called for 16 values that were required by law for discussion in a general plan. However, the PlanPHX Leadership Committee, comprised of about 20 volunteer members from various backgrounds, simplified the 16 values into subcategories contained within five big “core values.”
The older plan included 542 pages of an analytical code of planning, which served its purpose well but warranted streamlining, Stein said.
Members of the committee discovered that 75 percent of a sample of people who voted online or in a questionnaire all agreed on the top four core values, which the committee took as a sign of community support, Stein said.
Carol Poore said joining the PlanPHX Leadership Committee was one of the most rewarding experiences of her professional life. She said the group was diverse in demographics and opinions, which made the plan more authentic and accurate.
“I had a chance to understand what draws people to Phoenix as well as for in the future,” Poore said. “And that is what shaped the PlanPHX draft.”
Bednarek said the committee’s task now is to get Phoenix residents to understand aspects of the plan and how the city will ultimately reach its goals and overcome its challenges in a meaningful way. On the other hand, Stein said challenges are inevitable, and they include emotional, physical or demographic obstacles such as age.
The committee will transform from an independent group into a political campaign to promote the document once it’s finalized in early 2015. The committee will hold hearings throughout December, present the plan for City Council approval in February 2015 and campaign from March until August 2015, which is when Phoenix residents will vote on their ballots to either approve or dismiss the plan.
Stein is confident they will win the public’s approval if they continue to tell stories of the community that people can believe in. The 2002 plan passed with 78.2 percent approval.
“What we’re doing is writing a storybook,” Stein said. “Great design, great cities are all built on stories. And we’re telling the story from the way people told it to us. That’s what we’re doing. We’re storytellers, and our ability to tell that story is how we’ll be judged.”
The deadline to make comments concerning the 2015 General Plan is Friday, Dec. 13. The current, 183-page draft can be found here on phoenix.gov in a PDF format.
Contact the reporter at Samantha.Incorvaia@asu.edu
