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See related
stories:
Focusing community as ‘education
village’
Retaining McGregor seen as
economic key to town
Villagers create community goals, form group to address
challenges
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| The community planning
forum, sponsored by the Yellow Springs Men’s Group, at Wright
State on Saturday. |
The leaders of Yellow Springs and Miami Township want
to restore the population to a more sustainable level of 4,500.
They want to strengthen the village’s identity
as an education community and keep Antioch University McGregor in town.
They want to redefine the image of Yellow Springs
as a village that is open to visitors and supports business.
They also chose nine people to serve on a Community
Round Table to carry out these plans.
The goals were just some of the ideas that emerged
from last Saturday’s daylong conference, “Where We Are and Where
Are We Going,” sponsored by the Yellow Springs Men’s Group and
held at Wright State University.
The Men’s Group organized a committee to choose
75 representatives from Village and Township government, schools, businesses
and community organizations to brainstorm and initiate action plans to make
Yellow Springs a community where its residents want and can afford to live.
The forum’s 70 invited participants spent
the day defining the community’s challenges and identifying actions
to address them.
At the end of the day conference members chose nine
people to sit on a Community Round Table, which will educate the community
about its vision and make that vision reality.
The delegates chosen for the Round Table were chairman
Ron Schmidt, vice president of planning and research for the Men’s
Group; vice chairwoman Sharen Neuhardt; School Superintendent Tony Armocida;
Council president Tony Arnett; Mark Crockett, president of the Miami Township
trustees; school board member Richard Lapedes; Bruce Rickenbach, executive
vice president of the Men’s Group and chairman of the Village Planning
Commission; Mary Kay Smith, co-owner of the Winds Cafe; and Karen Wintrow
of the Antioch School board of trustees.
The committee held its first meeting on Tuesday
to plot its future course.
Men’s Group members organized the strategic
forum as a follow-up to “Yellow Springs Cost of Living Report,”
which they published in November 2002.
The report and a subsequent data projection to 2010
indicates that Yellow Springs is becoming an older, less populated, more
affluent and less diverse community.
The studies alarmed many local residents, but very
little was being done to change the current trends, said Saul Young, a member
of the Men’s Group who helped organized the conference.
The Men’s Group initiated the conference as
a way to invigorate people to take a proactive role in redirecting the trend
with the most consensus possible.
By most accounts, the day was a success.
“It far surpassed my expectations, and we got
clear input and clear action agendas from each of the five discussion groups,”
Young said on Monday. “We have a dynamite round table with a dynamic
good mix of folks with public service involvement. I couldn’t have
been happier, and I think we’re well on our way.”
Small group discussions
Saturday’s activities were driven by five
breakout groups, which focused on the local economy, housing, schools, taxes
and public revenue, and public services.
Though 33 of 49 people picked the economic discussion
group as their first choice, organizers assigned about 12 people to each
topic and asked each group to establish three action plans and pick coordinators
to carry out its goals.
The breakout groups met for two hours, then reconvened
in a large group when each small group gave an overview of its action plans.
The following is a summary of what was discussed.
The economic group’s top priority was keeping
Antioch McGregor in Yellow Springs. The adult college wants to expand and
is considering moving out of town. The economic group focused its strategy
for convincing McGregor to stay by meeting the school’s need for more
space, infrastructure and support services.
McGregor President Barbara Gellman-Danley told the
large group that Yellow Springs could be an appropriate place to build the
school’s new facilities. But she said that she needs to say to the
Antioch Board of Trustees, “I have a village behind me.”
The economic group’s second goal was to support
startup businesses and retain existing business by creating a business advisory
council, continuing to pursue the commerce park development and lobbying
the Village to create a resource position for business.
The group also focused on redefining Yellow Springs’
image in a more positive light.
The housing group said that the village needed to
“restore” its population to 4,500 people, which it could accomplish
by building or renovating an estimated 300 housing units, Bruce Bradtmiller
reported.
The “Cost of Living Report” noted that
Yellow Springs’ population has steadily declined over the last 30
years, from 4,624 during the 1970 census to 3,761 in 2000.
The group proposed a three prong approach to accomplish
its goal.
The first would address the “value of diversity”
by working with developers and Village Council to create mixed-use housing
developments, Bradtmiller said.
In addition, the group proposed increasing empty-nest
housing for older residents who no longer need to live in large houses,
Bradtmiller said. This could then free up more housing for families with
children.
The group’s third strategy targets vacant
lots and annexing land into Yellow Springs. The group proposed working with
the Village to encourage the owners of vacant lots to develop their properties.
Like the housing group, the tax and revenue group
determined that the community needs “to restore the population to
levels we had previous enjoyed,” Council member Jocelyn Hardman said.
The community needs “sustainable growth to share costs,” she
said.
The group suggested that local governments could
lower their costs by sharing resources and by “aggressively”
exploring federal and state grants, Hardman said. In addition, the group
recommended that the Village consider modifying the tax credit it gives
to Yellow Springers who work out of town and don’t pay Village income
tax.
The group said that the Village could generate revenue
by starting a new utility service that would provide high-speed Internet
access. A “steady source of income” could be found by rolling
Village utility costs into property taxes, Hardman said.
The group also said that the Village could pay for
capital improvement projects by selling bonds, raising utility rates and
using the Village’s Economic Development Revolving Loan Fund in “creative
ways,” she said. The group also suggested that the Village and Township
encourage local residents to donate money to them through trusts and wills,
she said.
The education group’s top priority was focusing
on Yellow Springs as an “education village” and promoting education
as the village’s most promising industry. They proposed forming an
education chamber of commerce, consisting of representatives of the community’s
education institutions.
The group also stressed the need to increase the
Yellow Springs school’s enrollment, which currently is 694. Armocida
said that the schools could accommodate 850 to 900 students.
The group proposed offering a housing rebate for
teachers and a day-care subsidy for families. The economic group also supported
maintaining and improving the quality of the Yellow Springs schools.
The public services group had an unwieldy topic
to discuss, Richard Zopf reported to the big group.
Group members decided they needed to know more about
the nature and cost of public services. They also said that the community’s
pulse needs to be taken on what it thinks are important public services.
“The trick is to come up with a mechanism for weighing and prioritizing”
services, Zopf said.
The group said that it would support an ongoing
effort by Council to educate the community about Village finances and to
create a five-year sustainable financial plan that includes ways to increase
Village revenue, cut costs and address the Village’s many capital
improvement needs.
Becoming an education village
The repeated mention of education as Yellow Springs’
greatest strength seemed to inspire participants to discuss as a large group
how to create an education village.
Participants mentioned education could be addressed
through business, culture, economics and the environment, and could be supported
by increased housing and improved amenities such as extended-stay lodging
options; better cooperation between education institutions; high-speed Internet
access; subsidizing school support; building a healthy Antioch; and a host
of other suggestions.
Some participants noted that throughout the day
such topics as elderly services, positive outlets for youth and health care
were left out. Others acknowledged that there were very few participants
under 40 and even fewer who represented those facing economic hardships.
Participants said that the rest of the community
would have to get behind the conference’s goals to make the forum
a success.
But participants did meet the two desired outcomes
of the conference, which were to prioritize action plans and form a round
table.
An official report of the meeting, compiled by Wright
State’s Center for Urban and Public Affairs, will be available in
the coming weeks at the Yellow Springs library and will be distributed to
participants, said Jane Dockery, the center’s associate director.
And the Community Round Table hopes to involve the public in its activities,
Schmidt said.
The last comprehensive community visioning process
took place in 1990, though local governments and organizations did not focus
their effort cooperatively, Young said.
Current community leaders have taken the visioning
process “way beyond our previous efforts,” he said.
“From the first 10 to 15 minutes [participants]
were wide-eyed, asking questions and actively and positively engaged in
working through our agenda,” Young said. “Miraculously, it worked,
perhaps through the good will of all the participants. We couldn’t
have done it without all of them.”
The results of Saturday’s conference will
be determined by the action from the Community Round Table.
Schmidt said conference participants accomplished
a set of ambitious goals with relatively easy consensus, and that the round
table would see them through.
“This was really a culmination of stuff that
had been going on for a long time, two and a half years of work all sort
of came together,” Schmidt said. “I thought Yellow Springs folks
rose to the occasion, which they often do.”
—Lauren Heaton and Robert Mihalek |
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