City View: Connected, informed, engaged community seeks long-term partners

by Bill Watkins

July 25,2008

If you think the headline sounds a bit like a personal ad, you are correct. Like everyone who participated in last year's Imagine Columbia's Future visioning process, I take the resulting vision plan very personally.

Some of you may have thought that visioning had quietly skipped town, but that is far from the truth.

After the "Community Choices" workshop in September 2007, Columbia's visioning committee reviewed the draft vision plan in October. The committee then drafted an implementation supplement and ratified the final vision report in December 2007. The visioning sponsors' council accepted the vision report in January. The Columbia City Council accepted the final vision report in February.

In April, Sarah Read, president of The Communications Center Inc., was contracted to serve as the city's visioning implementation consultant. Sarah, a former visioning committee member and citizen topic group facilitator, consulted with members of the city council, former sponsor's council and visioning committee throughout April and May. Based on their feedback, Sarah presented a preliminary report on visioning implementation at the June city council retreat.

During my State of the City address in June, I noted that visioning is already guiding and influencing the city's decision-making. In fact, city staff has been directed to look at vision goals and themes, identify existing departmental resources and take inventory of programs or initiatives that already incorporate visioning ideas. This is an important step in connecting vision goals with the appropriate actions and lays the foundation for tracking and monitoring our progress.

By the time you read this, you probably know that a Vision Implementation Open House is going to be from 4 to 8 p.m. on July 30 at the ARC. This event was designed to reconnect with citizens who were active during the visioning process and to gather their thoughts and suggestions about a visioning commission and draft report for implementation. It is also an opportunity to review the results of the resource inventory that city staff is working on. I believe the community will be pleasantly surprised by the progress we are making.

Following the July 30 open house, a celebration of visioning is tentatively scheduled for Sept. 4 at the Missouri Theatre Center for the Arts. This will be a community-wide event that celebrates current visioning efforts, invites public engagement and stimulates conversations about where we go from here. It is also an opportunity to present new ideas for community-wide collaboration and to identify the public-private partnerships needed to tackle some of the tough issues facing our community.

On Oct. 18, there will be a city government education and awareness event to connect citizens with elected officials, city staff and other public servants. This is certainly consistent with the goal that Columbia's government will be a model of transparency, efficiency and citizen participation. Additional information about this event will be announced as soon as possible and posted online at www.gocolumbiamo.com.

Vision efforts past and future might also be celebrated at First Night Columbia on Dec. 31. Again, details will be announced and posted on the city's Web site as they become available.

I believe our visioning process revealed a collective desire for a connected, informed, engaged community. Columbia has always been a rather passionate community. Now, Columbia has a vision and a plan. Sounds like a promising match.

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