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RICK HOXLEY: What I like about this intersection especially is that it’s pretty much the same as it’s been for a century.Council member Rick Hoxley stands at the corner of East Main and Water in downtown Kent and reflects on his hopes for the city’s future. Hoxley says he wants more people living downtown, additional businesses on Main Street and a more pedestrian friendly city. The existing comprehensive plan—which provides guidelines for planning, zoning and development—is 15 years old. It’s outdated, Hoxley says, and it’s time for the city to grow something new. RH: You’re continually harvesting. But when your crops start to diminish you say, “Oh wait a minute, we didn’t do something right. We haven’t fertilized right or we haven’t done that.” So the planning process requires us to do more than plan a garden. We’ve got to see what are the right things that will grow in our garden and that’s what we’re shaking out with the planning process.The fertilizer for the process is sustainable development. Bill Gruenkemeyer, co-leader for community development at Ohio State University extension says sustainability means Kent must consider economic, environmental and social issues in planning for growth. BILL GRUENKEMEYER: What sustainability tries to say is they’re all very important; we need all three sectors in our lives. So how can we think ahead? How can we find some ways that we can bring some balance between those three sectors in our lives so that they’re not in tremendous conflict with each other?For the past half year, Gruenkemeyer has worked with city officials to educate citizens about these principals. Kent has held a series of public meetings—there will be more than 50 by the time the process is over—to get the public on board and to get a sense of residents’ goals for their city. Gruenkemeyer says public input is the only way to ensure that Kenters embrace the plan—and to quell the concerns of the skeptics who doubt common citizens’ abilities. B.G. It’s important that people who really own this are the residents themselves and the only way you can do that is through conversation. So I think that has gone away now. I think people now feel that even though this may not stand up to some kind of statistically relevant model, the trade-off has been the conversations that are being held and the buy-in by people.Now half-way through the process, Kent residents have come up with some pretty clear goals. Kent Sustainability Planner, Mary Gilbert: MARY GILBERT: We want to protect certain parts of the city, so that they aren’t developed. We don’t want big-box; we don’t want Wal-Mart. If we do have Wal-Mart we want it to be designed to fit into Kent. A lot of residents want locally owned, small businesses.Gilbert says pedestrian orientation, bike paths and job creation are other prominent themes. It’s not that these goals are unique, Gilbert says, the difference will be how they are achieved. Still, critics are saying these kinds of initiatives usually end up on the shelf and left for dead. Other communities around the country that have implemented sustainable principles are familiar with the arguments. It was true in Racine, Wisconsin, says Bill Adams, executive director of Sustainable Racine. He says the nay-sayers claimed Racine was a hopeless rust-belt city: BILL ADAMS: That our downtown area had deteriorated beyond just being fixed, that our education system was beyond fixingFive years after Racine’s sustainable plans started, Adams says about 15 new retailers have moved into vacant stores downtown and a new superintendent is overhauling the school system. BA It took a while to get over that on the part of some people but we’ve made real tremendous progress.Kent’s progress, says Mary Gilbert, may be evident as early as next year when the town carries out pre-schedule road construction. But the impact of Kent’s sustainable comprehensive plan on downtown Kent or in some of the town’s neighborhoods is, like most economic development projects, ten to fifteen years in the making. In Cleveland, SN 90.3 Resources:
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