What's Next for the Regional Planning Initiative

For nearly 2 years the Grand Vision has been the talk of the town.

The multi million dollar regional planning initiative aims to set growth goals for the next 50 years based on public input.

For a while it was in the news regularly, but a viewer wrote in saying it's been a while since she's heard anything.

So what is next with the Grand Vision?

The answer is tonight's Fact Finder Report.

Regional Planning Director Matt McCauley says, "The study began with a major push toward public participation, 11 workshops, a variety of scorecards, 15 thousand people involved."

After months of regular highly attended forums gathering information about how residents would like the Grand Traverse Region to develop, it's been months since the Grand Vision Decision revealed the results of all of that input.

While the project has been out of the spotlight, planners say it's on schedule.

McCauley says, "the grand vision is in an interesting part of the study process. This spring we finished the public participation part of the study, now we're in the engineering and technical analysis part of the study."

And while that phase of the study doesn't require anything from most of us, it does set the stage for next phase that begins this fall: implementation.

McCauley says, "now that we're moving to implementation it's up to the community to take ownership and responsibility to coordinate and collaborate in such a way that we can implement key principles in the Grand Vision, the things that we heard the community wants most out of the Grand Vision."

Implementation means taking those ideas off the paper and onto the road. And that requires funding.

McCauley says, "of the original $3.3 million dollars allocated for the process approximately $2 million remaining that can be used for implementation. However that can only be used for transportation projects."

That's because the money for the study came from federal transportation funds.

So it can be used for improving traffic flow on roads like Division Street in Traverse City.

But while $2 million may sound like a lot of money for most of us, for road construction projects, it won't go too far.

McCauley says, "$2 million dollars for transportation projects in the construction of transportation projects probably won't cover all of those corridors of significance or the level of need in the region."

So planners will have to look for more money to move forward with more implementation and more money to cover other issues raised in the study like land preservation.

But they say a solid regional vision will go a long way to getting those dollars.

McCauley says "what this process does provide is a unified proposal to our state and federal officials saying we have an understanding on a regional level what our transportation needs are and we have a process to back that up, a citizen led process. So it gives us a very powerful message and allows us to be well positioned for the allocation of future transportation dollars in the region."

One of the big questions surrounding the Grand Vision all along was will this ever be more than another study that sits on a shelf and gathers dust. Now that we're almost two years into the process what do you think?

Leave your comments below.

If you'd like to know more about the Grand Vision, click here.