Lack of shared ‘vision’ puts city, residents at odds

June Casagrande

City staff and members of a residents committee are disputing how

a “vision statement” prepared by the committee as part of the general

plan update should be used.

Committee members Tom Hyans and Barry Eaton have asked that the

city go through the process of formally adopting the statement, which

outlines committee members’ goals and priorities of the general plan

update.

Staff say that the document is being used as was intended when it

was created: The vision statement was introduced at the city’s

Visioning Summit and is now part of the documentation that will be

considered as officials draft the revised general plan.

“I’m concerned that if we take it to public hearings and go

through the process of having it adopted, we could spend months doing

that we could instead spend on actually updating the general plan,”

Assistant City Manager Sharon Wood said, adding that the statement

was intended as a “touchstone” for the update process.

Hyans said that the document, which he helped draft, deserves more

formal acceptance by the city.

“I wouldn’t have spent a six months or a year working on this

thing if I didn’t think they it was going to be used as something

more than a ‘touchstone,’” said Hyans, a member of the slow-growth

Greenlight Steering committee. “This was to be the focus of the vox

populi. We want it to be used as a guideline for policy development

of the general plan.”

It is not clear that formally adopting the document would affect

whether its objectives were carried out.

Hyans said that his concern was not centered around one or several

points of the vision statement, but about the city’s respect for the

document as a whole.

Hyans and other Greenlight leaders have worried that some city

leaders want the updated general plan update to be sufficiently vague

to permit excessive development.

They point out that economic and traffic studies were unavailable

when they were drafting the vision statement and that the city could

use the contents of those studies as a rationale for diluting the

vision statement.

Greenlight opponents counter that the group is trying to stir up

unfounded fears about the general plan update to build its own power.

The council may adopt the statement as part of the completed

general plan.