Hundreds have their say on region's future

Traverse City Record-Eagle

October 19, 2007

By Brian McGillivary
bmcgillivary@record-eagle.com

TRAVERSE CITY -- Petra Kuehnis picked up the green pen and drew lines through large sections of Grand Traverse County, marking them off-limits to development.

"I want to see green space between the villages and the city," said Kuehnis of Traverse City. "We all seem to have the same idea (at her table), built up city cores circled by greenspace."

Across the room at Ted Okerstrom's table, they were creating a major road bypass around Traverse City and new entrance to the city from the south, but they too were concentrating future development around existing villages.

Kuehnis and Okerstrom were among more than 500 people who sat together at tables Wednesday night to express their vision for the future as part of a land use and transportation study of Grand Traverse County. The groups drew lines, picked how dense they wanted development and assigned the development to specific areas on the map with game pieces.

The effort was part of The Grand Vision, a $1.35 million study designed to be a citizen-led discussion to establish community values, vision and implementation strategies to address transportation needs.

They were asked to find space for about 35,000 new people in Grand Traverse County on anywhere from 12,000 to 4,000 acres of land.

Consultant John Fregonese said by 2050 the region will have grown to 250,000 people. "You have to start thinking of yourselves as a (community) of a quarter-million people," he said.

With people assigned randomly to tables, finding consensus was not always easy.

"Consensus comes quickly on the big picture, but when you start pushing (developments) around, that's the difficult part," said Evan Smith, as he helped his table spider their map with red lines representing bus or rail lines.

A few tables away, Pat Mullen's group had both rail lines connecting villages and a bypass around Traverse City.

"The whole concept was so new it was tough to visualize in the beginning," said Mullen of his table's finished map. "Now it's become a component of everyone's vision."

Kathy Ralston of Benzie County said she wasn't really in favor of the bypass but decided it would be OK.

"I do like the clustering that we've done," Ralston said. "In my mind, it will preserve open space."

Consultants will use the information gathered from the maps and comments to determine what to focus on in five additional public workshops. The study will take more than two years to complete.