Adrian Skabelund
What should Flagstaff look like in 2045? That question is at the center of the ongoing development of a new regional plan, an effort that city staff and local residents are already hard at work on.This year, the city entered into the second phase of the development of that plan and this month, the city is hosting two events to get public input on the plan, said Sara Dechter, who is leading the city’s effort.It’s an important document that city councils and staff can look back to and rely on when vetting new developments and policy changes.If a new construction project or change in policy furthers the goals outlined in the regional plan, it may be far more likely to succeed. And if a new project is counter to the plan, it may run into problems.“It has legal authority to influence development applications and the zoning code. So when we update the zoning code, and when we do development applications like the hospital,” Dechter told the Arizona Daily Sun.
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And Dechter said it is a process in which they are asking residents who participate to look long term, far into the future, and sometimes put on the shoes of future generations.“I think there’s a lot of empathy you have to do when we’re doing this long-range planning. I try to remind people like, my kid is 10; we’re planning for when she is 20, 30 years old. She may have a spouse, a family, be trying to get settled, trying to progress in her career. How can Flagstaff be the place she wants?” she said.The meetings this month have not been the only times the public has been able to provide input into the new regional plan, and won’t be the last.Phase 1 of development last year was based largely around seeking input from the public, local stakeholder groups, partner agencies, elected officials, and the numerous boards and commissions within the city.“We still haven’t written a word of the plan yet,” Dechter said. “People can come and see some of what we’re working on, but these are kind of mid-process checkpoints.”Dechter said they are moving from the phase of gathering information and starting to build a framework to see what the plan might look like.Building scenariosThat framework includes the creation of several scenarios that can be examined by the committee that later works with staff to write the plan.Those various scenarios can act as sort of “crash test dummies” for the potential futures Flagstaff could have, depending on how policies and development changes, Dechter said.They have already created a “business as usual” scenario to game out what the future of Flagstaff would look like if growth continued under the current conditions.“That’s a really good point of comparison. It’s more like a no-action alternative played out into the future,” Dechter said. “So we’re going to start with that business as usual, and then have some growth scenarios that are based off of all these conversations we’ve been having this year and say, ‘what are different ways we could grow based on the opinions, the feedback and the tradeoffs we’ve discussed with the public and staff so far, and let’s play those out.’”Those scenarios can vary wildly. They’ve looked at what the city would look like if all natural areas were preserved — leading to a much more dense city — to the exact opposite.Dechter said those scenarios and the framework they create will be helpful when later this year, they expect to convene a committee of community members to begin working to write the plan.That group will ultimately be convened by city manager Greg Clifton and county manager Steve Peru, but its members are vetted and nominated by both Flagstaff City Council and the County Board of Supervisors.“So my hope is we get good representation: that we’re hearing from all the neighborhoods, all the parts of the community that have been experiencing a lot of change in the last 10 years, and I hope they bring their lessons learned to that process [of writing the plan],” Dechter said.There is also already a technical advisory group of community members and experts assisting them in the creation of that framework and the scenarios, she said.That group is made up of community members with deep on the parts of the community, such as the Southside Neighborhood, or with expert knowledge on specific issues such as water.“They’re making sure we’ve dotted the I’s and crossed the T’s, that we haven’t overlooked things, that we’re really responding to the kind of feedback we’re getting,” Dechter said. But they are not involved in the writing of the plan itself.“They’re meeting right now and are looking hard at the scenario planning results and inputs, and critically, examining them to make sure we aren’t missing anything,” she said.Final adoption of the plan by the city council expected sometime in the city’s 2025 fiscal year.Mistakes of the pastDechter said she and staff are also taking the lessons they learned creating the Flagstaff 2030 Regional Plan to hopefully improve the development of this plan.Last time, a committee was convened but given very little structure to work with in writing the plan. And Dechter said that made the effort long, confusing and muddled.“[Last time] we convened a committee before they even had any work to do and we let them languish like they could all just manufacture a plan from their heads like Athena from the head of Zeus, you know. That’s sort of how painful it was, and we went on and did that for five years. This approach is really different,” Dechter said.She said they don’t want the process to drag on and “wear people out to the point where they can’t meaningfully participate.”There are also lessons from the current 2030 regional plan; Dechter said they want to avoid or correct those in the creation of the new document.For instance, the number of priorities listed in the 2030 regional plan has often come up as staff has heard from elected officials and boards and commissions.The current plan has 97 goals and 508 policies, which means it’s not uncommon to see goals and policies that conflict with each other. And when a potential policy change to development comes up before Council, or is examined by staff, conflicting policies within the plan means it can be difficult to parse whether a decision furthers the city’s goals or not.
Operations Section Cheif Aaron Graeser discusses the status on and containment efforts of the Volunteer Fire Friday afternoon. The fire was caused by lightning on May 23, is currently 23 acres big, and is 16 miles west of Flagstaff.
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