Project History
Ironically, the origins of this highly collaborative, citizen-led project are based in community disagreement over the costs and benefits of the proposed highway bypass and bridge around Traverse City. Arising from that conflict, community leaders came together in search of more collaborative solution to addressing the region's growth pains.For more than two years, a highly diverse group of 34 leaders representing local and state government, business, environmental interests, and social services worked by consensus to develop a work plan and recruit a team of the best consultants in the country to conduct a two year planning and implementation project. When an opportunity arose to reallocate the federal transportation funds once earmarked for the highway and bridge project to this community planning process, regional leaders collaborated with Senator Carl Levin, Senator Debbie Stabenow and Representative Dave Camp to make it happen.
The consultant team hired under the $1.3 million contract includes the nation's top experts in a highly interactive process called scenario planning. This approach starts with citizen planning workshops to envision different scenarios for the future, models how these scenarios will move traffic, develop land, and supply housing, and then asks the public to choose the scenario that best fits the future of the region. The consultants have expertise in organizing coalitions toward action, as well as planning and engineering the new transportation and land use solutions necessary to implement the publicly-selected growth strategy.
With these experts as resources and the committed leadership of a diverse group of local leaders, the Grand Vision has been launched with tremendous public support. Literally thousands of people have already participated in workshops, served on volunteer committees, and engaged through the website. The consultants, who have worked in many of the nation's major metropolitan areas, say they have never seen this kind of public participation – anywhere. Such powerful grassroots interest has already driven leadership at all levels of government. From Kirk Steudle, the director of the Michigan Department of Transportation, who has called the Grand Vision a "model for the rest of the state" to the county commissions from six counties who put their support and money behind the project to the city and township officials in the region who have come to the table in recognition that any successful planning process has to be regional; the Grand Vision has become the centrally unifying vehicle that will define life in the region for generations.
In September of 2008 the citizens of Antrim, Benzie, Kalkaska, Leelanau, Grand Traverse, and Wexford counties will have the once-in-a-generation opportunity to select their blueprint for the future. Five different scenarios for growth will be put forward and citizens will winnow them down to one consensus vision for the future. Project leaders have named it the "Grand Vision Decision," and it's a critical point in the process because out of it comes a widely supported growth plan that will drive the direction of growth for the region.
