With the excitement of May’s eight-day workshop still in the air, Lawrence Group consultants returned to Western North Carolina June 23-25 for a quick report on development of the “Toolbox” of guidelines for responsible planning and development in North Carolina’s mountains.

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A first draft of the publication, which will be available both online and in printed form, should be on this website by the end of July, with the final version posted in late August and printed in September.

“What we’re presenting,” Lawrence Group principal Craig Lewis told a packed house at the Cashiers library, “is a series of choices to help you answer the question: ‘How do you want to grow?’”

If you’re new to these pages and want an overview of how we got to this point, you can take a tour of the background of the project by clicking “Overview” tab on the toolbar on the upper right of this page. To follow day-by-day progress during the May workshop, click the “Charrette Journal” tab.

The June presentation in Cashiers was one of four stops for Lewis and Lawrence Group designer Amanda Huggins. They revisited the sites of two satellite workshops, in the Cowee Community in Macon County and in Cashiers. They reported to “Toolbox” steering committee members at the offices of the Southwestern Commission council of governments organization. And they spoke at the annual Mountain Green Conference at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, where they linked the “Toolbox” project in North Carolina’s seven westernmost counties to goals of economic, social, and environmental sustainability.

Since many in the Mountain Green audience were hearing about the “Toolbox” project for the first time, Lewis’s PowerPoint of that presentation is the most comprehensive. To see it, download the file here (66mb file).

Of special interest to the folks in Cashiers and the Cowee Community, of course, were updates on soon-to-be-released recommendations for community groups in those two communities. They were two of four model projects the consulting teams took on in May to demonstrate how tools in the “Toolbox” might apply to specific parcels or geographic areas. To see Lewis’s PowerPoint report to the Cowee group, download the file here. And for the PowerPoint presented to the Cashiers audience, download here.

To help illustrate the June interim reports, the Lawrence Group created four posters with capsule explanations and graphic representations of key ideas for each of the model projects. They’re good ways to get quick overviews. You can view them by clicking on the appropriate poster headings in the “Latest Ideas” column to the right.

For background videos on the four model projects, use the following links to features posted during the May workshop:

• The Cowee Community
• Cashiers
• Mountain Watch project in Haywood County
• Wood Farm