The Planning Department of a city government has a fairly straightforward if difficult task: they attempt to understand the community’s interests and needs and set the agenda for the next few years of city priorities.
The City of Hamilton spent 18 months gathering survey responses, public meeting feedback, and focus group data that revolved around a central point: what did the people of Hamilton want Hamilton to do and be in the next 15 years? This information was the guide for crafting the city’s new master plan, which can be accessed at planhamilton.com.
Some of Plan Hamilton’s Priorities:
•Residents, Housing, and Neighborhoods: the Plan mentions both making improvements to housing for current residents of Hamilton while also developing housing that will draw in new residents to the city.[Text Wrapping Break]
•Cooperation and Collaboration: The city plans to focus on working with the schools, Butler County, the State of Ohio, and public/private partnerships to increase opportunity and quality of life in Hamilton.[Text Wrapping Break]
•Music, Arts, and Culture are part of what the city wants to support, encouraging Hamilton as a destination for those seeking these forms of entertainment.[Text Wrapping Break]
•The plan emphasizes the unique Utilities program in the City of Hamilton, working toward long-term sustainability, affordability, communication, and reliability.[Text Wrapping Break]
•The Mobility section mentions priorities of strong road maintenance, better public transportation, more walkable streets, and long-term plans for making getting to Hamilton easier, like a “North Hamilton Crossing” of the river that would bypass High Street.[Text Wrapping Break]
•The Plan offers direction for the Parks system, which has goals to expand in areas that are currently under-utilized, like Combs Park, and to make more parks available to all of the residents of Hamilton.[Text Wrapping Break]
•The Economic Development section focuses on making the city attractive to businesses so that they will bring and retain good jobs for the residents of the city in strategically-located “business corridors” throughout the city. [Text Wrapping Break]
The Next Step: Implementing the Plan
Liz Hayden, Director of Planning at the City of Hamilton, hopes that Plan Hamilton will truly shine as a guiding document for action.
“I hope that implementation sets us apart; I want to make sure we work on making things happen,” she says. “I’m confident we will because we’re already doing a lot of the things we want to accomplish.”
Having the user-friendly website has allowed more people to access the plan, and even the statistics from which web pages are visited can help them shape priorities for the city.
“I get to see how people are using the Plan online,” says Hayden. “People’s priorities according to survey results are Mobility and Economic Development, but the thing that people look at most on the website is the Residents, Housing, and Neighborhoods. It shows this is something they really care about.”
Priorities in the implementation phase include a variety of projects: there is work being done to reduce blight and involve neighborhoods in the process, for instance. Another major priority in the works is a reshaping of zoning policy.
“We are going to do an ordinance overhaul to make it more user-friendly, but we will also rezone things to make them more appropriate,” says Hayden. “It could have big consequences: we’ve rezoned the Riverfront from industrial to entertainment/mixed-use, which gives us flexibility but also ensures that what happens there is what the community has said they want.”
The hope is that, through a large amount of feedback from the community, the Plan has become both specific enough to shape concrete next steps and general enough to respond to future unexpected events.
“This is a 30,000-foot-view, big-picture vision statement of our area and where we want to be in 15 years, but I also wanted us to use real examples that are very powerful,” says Hayden. “There is still flexibility.”