The city of Fayetteville is putting together a new master plan for its downtown area. Britin Bostick is the long-range planner for the city. She joined me yesterday in the Bruce and Ann Applegate News Studio 2 to talk about the new plan.
Bostick: Our plan is 21 years old. Our plan is old enough to drink on Dickson Street, and as everyone around here will know, Fayetteville has changed a lot in 21 years. We are 40,000 to 50,000 more people in population. We’ve got double the number of students at the University of Arkansas we had when the plan was first adopted. And so it’s really time to say, okay, we are living in the future vision of that plan. And so what does it look like for us to imagine a future moving forward from now and maybe what are the things that the previous plan didn’t address or didn’t address successfully, that we can revisit now and get straightened out?
Moore: The plan is described as resident-driven. How do you balance resident input compared to expert input like that from city employees like yourself?
Bostick: When we think about resident input, a lot of times that’s happening so late in the process that I think people rightly don’t feel that they see their comments and input being reflected in the final planning document. And the way that we’re doing it this time is we are not starting with a predetermined outcome. We are not starting with a finished scope of work. We have not hired consultants yet to lend their technical expertise. We’re truly starting with the community.
What that looks like is saying Fayetteville, could you please respond to these questions to help us understand what should the project scope of work even look like? This is the first time that I’m aware we’ve given our community the opportunity to help us decide what all the plan needs to include and address. That’s very different from making that decision ahead of time, moving forward with consultants and contracts and setting up the planning process and then asking people to participate once that is well underway.
I’m very excited about the feedback we’ve already gotten. It’s happening so quickly. We’ve got hundreds of comments already through a couple of different means, and people are giving very thoughtful, considered, constructive feedback. People are pointing out things that they think could be better. People are talking about the places and the things about downtown that they love so much, and that we need to be great stewards of. All of that’s going to be incorporated into what the planning process itself is going to look like next year.
Moore: How wide open of a “we’d like your input” is it? Are there any sort of guardrails, or is it literally just “how can we make downtown better?”
Bostick: We’re asking some very specific questions that get at information we’re trying to discover, kind of understand better. Make sure that the way I think about the needs for a downtown plan are aligned with our community’s thoughts about a need for a downtown plan.
So, for example, what would you invest in downtown? And if the city is going to make investments in downtown, how can those be community-driven investments? Well, for us to say, well, we think certain investments are needed, the community may or may not align with that. Or what might happen is people have insights into where we need to put investments that we may not have realized or seen. And we have so many experts on the ground, I really wanted to consult with their expertise first.
And so some of the questions are more specific. How would you like to incorporate nature better downtown? What are your favorite places to go downtown? And the favorite places to go isn’t merely a listing of the things that people enjoy, or where they choose to spend their money. It’s a lot about feeling connectedness. It’s a lot about enjoyment and something that you find a sense of community in.
So, for examples, we have longtime businesses on the square that are coming up very frequently in the comments. We have very new businesses downtown that are also coming up very frequently in the comments. So it’s great to see that we’ve got legacy businesses as well as new businesses that are really appealing to our community members, and those are the places that they like to spend their time.
Moore: Talking about new, this goes really well into my next question. What efforts are you making to make sure residents who don’t usually participate in things like this still have a voice?
Bostick: I think that is something that we can do such a better job with, and I’m excited to have just an entirely new position on long range this year, specifically for communication and outreach. That’s been really great. Casey Black is our new outreach and communications specialist just for long-range planning, and Casey is busy building relationships and reaching out to folks.
We really want to use existing networks as much as we can. So if there’s somebody that you know who would want to be a part of this but isn’t normally part, please invite them. We’re inviting a lot of people. We’re asking people to invite their people to be part of this process.
And a big part of the shift looks like this. I like to talk about planning as kind of a meet-and-three situation. You have three public meetings and then you get a plan. And if you think about those public meetings, they may or may not be on the right day for you. They may or may not be at the right time for you. You might be out of town, you might be working, you might have childcare emergencies come up. You might just not be feeling well that day. And if you miss that day, you miss your opportunity.
And then the response might be, well, just go online. But that assumes that you easily navigate online resources and online opportunities. And we are building a pretty massive contact list. We’re talking to a lot of groups. We’re about to start reaching out to even more groups to say, ‘Hey, we’d like to do this work with you. Can you tell us how we can connect with the people who are part of your group, whether that’s a community group or a more formal organization?’
And building those networks, I think, is going to be one of the best ways that we can do that. We’re talking to business owners very directly. Like, tell us about your experience in the downtown. Where I think the benefit of doing surveys is that they’re much more manageable. There’s a lot more guardrails on a survey. You have kind of a limited set of options that you can respond to. And maybe we’ll do a survey. I’m not sure yet. We have quite a ways to go in this planning process.
But right now the comments are all open-ended comments, which means you can tell us what you think. And believe it or not, that actually helps us to understand who else we can be reaching out to. We’ve asked people to let us know if they want to be contacted frequently, and what’s been really nice is we just got a long-range cellphone. And, you know, that seems so normal today, right? But people haven’t been able to text us.
And so you’ve been relying on email or other digital forms of communication. But what we’ve learned is that a lot of members of our community prefer to get text message updates or text information. So we got a cellphone just so that we can start providing that.
Moore: You guys also had an event on Sunday, the city did, and you had a presence at that. Do you find that city-organized or city-based events where you can have a presence and speak to people who were just passing by and don’t expect to see you, you get the same sort of results? Or do you get different results when people are just happening upon you as opposed to intentionally seeking out that information?
Bostick: You know, it’s funny. People coming upon us and finding that we’re there is one of the most fun ways to engage. We’re usually doing something very fun and interesting, and then people want to talk to me about my career altogether. Like, ‘How did you get into long-range planning? What is all this? What does long-range planning even mean? That doesn’t make any sense. It’s a three-word series.’
What I think is going to be really good about the way we’re approaching it this time is that we are wanting to spend a lot more time going to people where they are, and less time trying to get people to come to a very specific, time-limited location where we are.
And you know what was fun about Sunday? It’s clearly a very Fayetteville-focused event when you talk to folks who are coming by. They’re all living in Fayetteville. A lot of them are downtown residents or live very close to the downtown and have walked up to the square.
And again, these are people who have a lot of expertise. They’re walking the sidewalks. They are interacting with people a lot. They’re seeing what the needs are. They’re dreaming about what could be possible. And my hope is that people will feel free to get a little wild and a little funky with their ideas. No matter how impractical they may sound, something good can still come out of those wilder ideas.
For example, and this is why it’s so fun to be in person, this is why it’s so fun to kind of step away from the computers. Somebody had mentioned they kind of had an idea, but it seemed really impractical. And I said, well, what was your idea? And they said, well, you know, have you ever thought of a gondola? And I said, well, have I ever thought of a gondola? Let me tell you about my crystal escalator up to the top of Mount Sequoyah. And there are digital panel screens that show you the history of Fayetteville and pictures as you go up.
And it’s this very bizarre but fascinating digital experience in the clouds. And then I was all of a sudden the weirdo, right. But when we say we’re setting a vision for the downtown, that’s what we’re talking about.
Moore: You’ve described part of this process as layering on an emotional connection. Can you elaborate more on that and what you mean by that sort of idea?
Bostick: Something that’s so incredible about working in Fayetteville — and I live here, too — but something that’s incredible about working in Fayetteville is how many people you meet who love living here, and every community doesn’t get to have that. Every community does not have so many people who love this place.
And being able to capture that love into how do we invest in this thing that we love, so that we can continue to love it in the future? It’s such a fun and rewarding and fulfilling thing to do. So I want to do it with absolutely as many people as possible. And when we do that together, it does layer on a lot of ideas and perspectives and memories.
Something that we’ve talked about — I haven’t told anybody this yet — something that we’ve talked about for the downtown plan is typically in a plan document, you’ll have this kind of history narrative at the very start. Here’s the history of our downtown. That history has been written so many times by people who are so much better qualified to write it than I am.
But we said, what if we didn’t do it that way this time in this plan? What if this plan had a collection of memories and photographs from people who remember downtown over the years? And rather than have this very copy-paste version of Fayetteville’s downtown history, what if we told the memories that are not so commonly known? And what if that became our history?
And so we’re thinking a lot about ways to completely change what a planning document does and what it looks like in order to better reflect our own community and the story of us. Because that story of us is really important to know as we move forward. And it’s something that people tell me so often, like, they don’t want to lose that, right? Like, there’s something so precious here that they don’t want to lose.
And a lot of times, change can feel very much like I’m going to lose this thing that I love. And so how do we manage change in a way that we keep the thing that we love, while we also have a downtown that works for the city that we are becoming and the needs that are arising in a 21st-century Fayetteville.
Moore: Can you talk timeline on this at all? What do we know about where we want to be and at what time with this plan?
Bostick: So the goal is to do a lot of community input this fall. So for the next couple of months. Then you get into kind of things are getting cold, holiday season’s coming. You’re at the last of the markets, the last of the farmers market before I like to call it dark winter descends.
And so we’re wanting to take best advantage of that. So this fall we want to get the dialogue going, make sure that people know we’re doing this planning project, start getting those communication networks built, get that dialogue going, like I said, and let people know that we’re here and we’re doing this work.
And then next year will be the planning work. The questions won’t be so broad or so vague or so open. The questions will be more specific. That’s where we’ll be creating the plan components.
I think a lot about the farmers market or other things on the square. Those are events that have a lot of vendors, and vendors have very technical needs. So we need electricity, we need water, we need bathrooms. And we also need Wi-Fi because people are taking digital payments on their phones or through a touch pad or some other device.
So if we want vendors to be able to succeed, and we want vendors to be motivated to come and participate and help make this event really great, they need the equipment, they need the infrastructure for that to work. And their version of infrastructure might be very different from the infrastructure that you need for housing to succeed downtown. But everybody needs infrastructure investment in the downtown because we’re in the 21st century.
And this is kind of what it looks like today versus when the farmers market got started — it was all cash. And so as I’m thinking about what our plan needs, we’re going to have to get into some of the details of what does the farmers market need for success from an infrastructure perspective?
We’re already getting input on more housing downtown, but let’s have a conversation about what that housing looks like, what those housing needs are, and then what the infrastructure needs are for that to be successful in the downtown.
Next year will be a lot of work, but we want to give kind of a long on-ramp to people understanding what this is going to look like, what our approach is, and then having time to be incorporated into the process before we start writing the plan. Like I said, oftentimes that happens before the community is involved, and I want to do it a little bit differently this time.
Moore: Britin Bostick is the long-range planner for the city of Fayetteville. She joined me yesterday in the Bruce and Ann Applegate News Studio 2.
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