COMPASS Action Teams (CATs) were developed at the Community COMPASS Countywide Town Meeting, where almost 500 participants registered to focus on each of the four core goals: Assuring Economic Prosperity, Building Collaborative Decision-Making, Embracing Diversity and Equity, and Balancing Development and the Environment. During CAT meetings held from March to May 2002, volunteers and experts in specific areas worked in one of the three sub-groups formed for each of the four goals. These groups developed long-term recommended strategies and actions to be reviewed by the Planning Partnership and COMPASS Steering Team, which, if accepted, will then be reviewed by the Regional Planning Commission. The strategies and actions are based on a collective, shared vision so that mutual goals (at all levels of government) related to physical, economic and social issues can be planned for comprehensively and achieved collaboratively.

The CATs (COMPASS Action Teams) Process

From March to May 2002, COMPASS Action Teams met on four separate occasions, with some groups holding additional meetings in the interim. The 320 participants were broken up into teams based on their interest in one of the four core goals (Assuring Economic Prosperity, Building Collaborative Decision Making, Embracing Diversity and Equity, and Balancing Development and the Environment) and then divided further into three subgroups to address specific issues of those core goals. The first meeting of the CATs, held the week of March 18th, was an orientation, which focused on the understanding of a group’s respective core goal. After familiarizing themselves with the COMPASS process and the Team Charter, participants broke into their subgroups to identify underlying issues, assets, and barriers that would be pertinent in subsequent sessions.

The second meeting, held the week of April 8th, concerned the review of initial “strawman strategies” for accomplishing each team’s core goal, which were generated by an outside consultant from the ideas
which came out of the Countywide Town Meeting, Community Forums, and existing plans and research. Each subgroup examined how these strategies were already being implemented, then went on to develop
additional complementary strategies. At the third meeting, held the week of April 29th, CAT team members
ranked and prioritized strategies in terms of four criteria: • Probability of significant positive impact on objective (potential)

• Gap between current status of the strategy and desired status (need)

• Implementation difficulty (time required)

• Implementation difficulty (cost required)

Each subgroup determined the seven strategies that were most important to their goal. As they went through the process, many subgroups focused on the first two criteria and found that time and cost required
often seemed irrelevant in the face of some strategies that people felt were absolutely essential. Each subgroup also considered the issues that were important in implementation, including whether a strategy
already was being carried out to some degree, by whom, and if there were similar models elsewhere that were relevant. The fourth and final meeting, held on May 21st, was a strategy/action workshop where CAT members concentrated on policy implications of the strategies they had developed. Pertinent issues included:

• how a strategy would impact the community

• what preexisting policies and assets would facilitate or impede implementation

• geographical and temporal considerations

• steps that would need to be taken to bring a strategy to fruition,

• the role of Hamilton County, specific individuals, and organizations in implementing a strategy

• the development of indicators that would help to measure eventual success of objectives and strategies

This served as a culmination of the CAT process, with the groups meeting together to focus on all the strategies before splitting up to analyze what was required in order to implement the strategies integral
to accomplishing the four core goals. With the CATs process concluded, 160 strategies have been developed, which are detailed in The CATs Tale; Report of the Community COMPASS Action Teams.

Click here to download the Report of the Community COMPASS Action Teams
           (2.8 MB  |  Adobe Acrobat PDF).

NOTE: This is a large download. If you have a low-bandwidth (modem) internet connection you should right-click the download link and choose to "Save Target As" or "Save Link As". Once the file has downloaded, open it in Adobe Acrobat.