90 People Envision Future
At Cooperstown ‘Charrette’
By JIM KEVLIN • allotsego.com
COOPERSTOWN – Close to 90 people spent two hours at this evening’s “Design Charrette,” detailing and discussing the pros, cons, dreams and fears of “America’s Most Perfect Village,” as a community visioning effort got underway.
“A lot of community happened around this room,” declared Lisa Nagle, a principal in Elan Planning, Saratoga Springs, when the session in the CCS cafeteria was over. The goal is to develop an updated Community Plan by next spring; the current version dates from 1994.
There were many common streams in the structured conversation as the audience broke up into nine discussion groups. Cooperstown is quaint and historic, but also a “Jekyll and Hyde” community that’s boring in the winter months.
The collective wisdom called for more people, less baseball, more varied retail, more jobs. “Population growth would be a salve for a lot of other things,” a leader of one of the tables reported back.
The two-hour session began with audience members dividing into smaller discussion groups around nine tables. People at each table then answered four questions: In one word, describe Cooperstown today. What do we want Cooperstown to be in 10 years? What issues need to be addressed to get there? What actions need to be taken?
Each table then marked up a map with icons identifying views, destinations, community icons, area needing improvement and so on. A spokesperson for each table then reported the findings back to the group.
Nagle and her planners will review the data Tuesday for trends and commonalities, then report their findings at another meeting, 6-8 p.m. Wednesday, also at the CCS cafeteria. Tonight’s session and that one is open to the general public, as is Wednesday’s, and Nagle said her team will continue to report back to the community as the plan comes together.
The visioning effort is a collaboration of the county Economic Development Agency and the Village of Cooperstown. Nagle outlined many benefits of such an effort, but noted the bottom line is, if a community get agree on what it wants, its state and federal grant applications are moved to “the top of the pile.”
