| Local governments and civic groups have spent $15 million in the last five years on planning efforts to address every conceivable dilemma.
Those planning initiatives produced reams of data on the need for a light-rail transit system, an expanded convention center and what it will take to host the Olympics. They produced new ideas on how the Cincinnati region can best compete in a global economy. They spawned scores of recommendations on how to proceed with development in Northern Kentucky, along the Cincinnati riverfront and in western Hamilton County. And they've led to new strategic plans for more than a dozen different neighborhoods in the city of Cincinnati.
But they've yet to produce a regional consensus on any of the major issues facing the Tri-State. Now, a trio of local planning agencies say the $835,000 they'll spend in the next two years should help people make sense of those far-flung efforts.
"If we keep fragmenting every issue, we'll never get there," said Ron Miller, executive director of the Hamilton County Regional Planning Commission.
Miller is the chief architect of Community Compass, the county's first comprehensive master plan since 1964. His goal: to get all 49 planning jurisdictions within the county to collaborate on a single vision. One of those jurisdictions is the city of Cincinnati, which is in the early stages of formulating its own communitywide master plan, its first since 1948. At the same time, the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments is formulating new land-use guidelines for the eight-county region.
This is the first time that Cincinnati and Hamilton County are simultaneously producing comprehensive master plans. Backers see the trio of efforts as having huge potential, one that could bring direction to a rudderless region. But critics argue it's a waste of time and money, one that is not likely to yield tangible results.
Miller understands that criticism, given the lack of results from the planning efforts of the last decade.
"Right now, I think you'd have to say all of those various initiatives are not coordinated," said Miller. "They're incremental, fragmented efforts, and there's dozens more of them out there as well. One of the essential ingredients of Community Compass is that we get a handle on all of these initiatives and see if there's potential for aligning them."
Adds Cincinnati Planning Director Liz Blume: "The way the process is going to be designed is to bring all of those initiatives into the room, get all of those recommendations at the table and then say to Cincinnati, `What's our role here?' The Cincinnati plan is going to be an important piece. It's going to be the thing that directs Cincinnati activity so that it's complementary to what's going on in the region instead of being at odds with it."
The point man for OKI's land-use study, Bill Miller, sees "a real opportunity for these plans to all get tied together. I think people intuitively know that the way we're going about this is more expensive than it needs to be. People are starting to understand the latest buzzword of smart growth. They're starting to ask, how can we do this better?"
The OKI plan has been in the works for more than two years, but the agency only recently hired a full-time planner to lead the effort. Miller expects the agency to draft its land-use guidelines by next summer. The Compass plan began with a survey of county residents in December. A series of public hearings is expected to begin this spring, leading to a final plan in 2002. Blume said Cincinnati City Council budgeted $90,000 for the city's master plan in 2001. She hopes to raise another $210,000 from private foundations and complete the plan within 18 months. She said much of the planning will be done by city employees in the departments that will be charged with implementing the plan's recommendations.
While it's early in the process, reaction to the new planning efforts is generally positive.
"This is unprecedented and long overdue," said Cincinnati Councilman Jim Tarbell. Added developer Arn Bortz: "We don't need 15 different plans, each of them telling us what 11.5 percent of the problems are. There's a huge need to knit them together."
Regionalism supporters see promise in the new approach.
"For the city to say that it's going to put itself in a position to coalesce all these ideas and plans is a big deal," said Kathryn Merchant, executive director of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation. "My hope is that if we can decide on all those things that are important for our community, then it's a matter of how we sequence these things to get them all done."
Support for the new efforts is hardly unanimous, however. Fewer than half of the jurisdictions invited to participate in the county's Compass plan have opted to do so, although Miller notes the 22 communities that have signed on represent 76 percent of the county's population and 64 percent of its land mass.
Hamilton County Auditor Dusty Rhodes argued the region has seen few results from the proliferation of planning in the past five years.
"It's a cottage industry that feeds upon itself and keeps turning out reams and reams of information that never results in anything tangible," said Rhodes. "I don't understand this need, where everything has to be controlled. It doesn't work that way. You can't micro-manage every aspect of urban life."
Even supporters of the new planning efforts question their ability to have a long-term impact on the region. Bill Bowdy has spent 30 years as executive director of Kenton County's lead planning agency, the Northern Kentucky Area Planning Commission.
"The problem is, after the plan is done, each city has its own authority" to enact sections of the plan, Bowdy said. "If they don't pursue the direction of the plan, it just doesn't work."
Nevertheless, Bowdy thinks the new planning efforts should leave the region better organized than it is now.
"This is at least an attempt to bring things together and have some common flag to rally around," he said. "It may happen a little bit by osmosis."
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