Item 12-B
Planning Commission Meeting: April
5, 2006
TO: The Honorable Planning
Commission
FROM: City Planning Staff
SUBJECT: Land Use and Circulation Element Draft
Goals Outreach Methodology
Introduction
On January 24, 2006 City Council
directed staff to pursue an outreach methodology that would involve the
community in an effort to refine project goals.
Draft goals have been distilled from the work products of previous
outreach initiatives such as the Emerging Themes and Opportunities &
Challenges reports. Council requested
that the draft goals be vetted through the public participation process before
proceeding with the analytical process.
Consequently, staff has developed a consistent program of
activities that seeks to build upon the information collected during previous
outreach efforts by validating draft goals which will be used to drive
preparation of new Land Use and Circulation Elements. The outreach program is also designed to
solicit input from the community regarding specific objectives against which
the success of each goal can, in part, be measured. Further clarification of what defines a
“goal” or an “objective” is presented in an upcoming City Council Information
Item which will be received by the Planning Commission shortly.
The approval of draft goals and associated objectives will
help staff devise a framework for testing alternative land use and circulation
strategies. This analysis will be presented to the public in the form of a
workbook that will be released later this year.
Staff is seeking Planning Commission input with regard to
the program’s content in order to ensure that the community has ample
opportunity to evaluate and comment on the draft goals and participate in this
stage of the process that will serve as a springboard for future efforts.
Staff has devised this public outreach program with the
following purposes in mind:
Outreach Methodology
The outreach program
is designed to capture a wide audience, and involves four components of varying
interface. Publicity for these events
and exercises is already underway using the internet, city mailing lists,
newspaper advertisements, posters, and other city-sponsored communications
tools. The outreach effort includes the
following activities:
Goals and Objectives Workshop (April 26)
The purpose of this
workshop is to present the community with an opportunity to validate or modify
the draft goals developed by staff, and to provide examples of key objectives
against which the success of the goals can be measured. Participants will first illustrate their
level of support for each of the 10 goals associated with the Land Use and
Circulation Elements by placing a colored dot along a sliding scale that ranges
from “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree.”
Next, referencing several example objectives composed by staff,
participants will be encouraged to use colored Post-Its to write in new
objectives that they feel are important to the realization of individual goals.
To bring the workshop
to a conclusion, staff members will report back to the assembled participants
the obvious trends in support or opposition of each goal. Staff will also quickly voice several key
objectives gathered from each station.
The workshop will end with a reminder that the public outreach process
is ongoing, and additional opportunities for participation will be available at
the passive display in the Main Library, on the internet at the www.shapethefuture2025.net
website, and at the Santa Monica Festival.
Main Library Display (April 27-May 8)
Following the
workshop meeting, staff will display the workshop products at the Main Library
with the intention to involve more community members in the outreach
process. The workshop boards will be
arranged on easels and placed in a strategic location for review and
observation by library visitors. Index
cards that have been printed as small-scale versions of the workshop boards
will be available for participants to illustrate their level of support for
each of the 10 goals, as well as suggest key objectives useful to accomplishing
the goal. After completion, participants
will be instructed to place the index cards in a “suggestion box” that is
adhered to each easel. Staff will collect
comments on a daily basis.
Internet Survey (April 27-May 21)
Running concurrently
with the workshop and the library display, staff proposes enabling additional
functionality to the www.shapethefuture2025.net
website to survey a larger audience. The
survey’s scope will remain limited to the questions asked by the workshop and
the library display with the additional benefit of immediate analysis. Staff is currently developing this approach
in coordination with the Information Systems Department.
Santa Monica Festival (May 13)
The Goals and
Objectives public outreach effort will culminate at the Santa Monica Festival
on May 13. After analyzing the feedback
from the workshop, the library display and the ongoing internet survey, staff
will present updated materials to the community for review and additional
feedback. At this event, the public will
again have the opportunity to validate the goals through dot voting, and to
propose objectives by way of completing a brief form that will be collected by
city staff. Participants will also be
invited to voice additional comments on the online survey, located at the www.shapethefuture2025.net
website.
Planning Commission
and City Council Meetings
Input received from
the public regarding the draft goals will be presented to the Planning
Commission in June. At that time, the Commission can formally offer
recommendations to the City Council regarding the direction and language of the
goals and comment on the community input. The City Council will consider the
draft goals after the Commission completes its review and finalizes its
recommendations.
At the time of
writing, staff envisions the following work product being generated from the
proposed outreach activities:
The data collected
from these separate activities will be analyzed by staff and converted to
information that is to be included in a summary report prior to the
Commission’s review of draft goals. The
report will evaluate the success of the overall outreach effort in achieving
community consensus of the draft goals and in identifying objectives that will
help measure the City’s progress in realizing them. The various comments generated from this initiative
will be recorded as an addendum to the report, presented to the Planning
Commission and City Council, and posted on the project website.
Discussion
The following questions are offered to the Planning
Commission to serve as a starting place for discussing the outreach program and
providing suggestions on how to improve the success of this effort.
1.
Do
the outlined activities sufficiently engage the public over the issues of Goals
and Objectives relative to the Land Use and Circulation Elements?
2.
Do
the outlined activities advance the project forward toward defining draft goals
and setting the stage for future analysis?
3.
Are
there any other types of questions that should be included in the outreach
effort?
4.
Do
the activities need to be modified?
5.
Are
the proposed publicity channels sufficient?
What are other ways in which we can advertise this outreach effort?
This report recommends that the Planning Commission discuss
and provide input regarding the Goals and Objectives public engagement exercise.
Attachments: