How can we grow local economies in North Carolina’s mountain region without threatening the natural assets that attract new people and new investment?

How do you adjust to inevitable change without sacrificing community character and sense of place?

Those were the big questions behind concerns residents expressed in 10 meetings in the NC’s seven westernmost counties and the Qualla Boundary throughout the month of April, 2008. Now, those concerns – and those questions – will be used to shape the agenda for a week-long workshop in May. The purpose of the workshop, called a “charrette,” is to create a “Tool Box” of guidelines for responsible planning and development in the mountains.

This unique public engagement process began in November of 2007 with interviews for a documentary about “Seeking Balance in the Mountains.” Gabriel Cumming, outreach coordinator for the Mountain Landscapes Initiative “Tool Box” effort, explains where we are in the process now:

Delivering this set of tools for planning and building in the mountains is the mission of a partnership between the Asheville-based non-profit The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina and the Southwestern Commission, the Council of Governments organization serving the seven western counties of Region A. The “Tool Box” partnership is the initial pilot project in The Community Foundation’s Mountain Landscapes Initiative (MLI). Lessons learned from the pilot will be applied to expansions of the program in the broader mountain region.

So what came out of the 10 Community Forums?

Many of the concerns were ones implied by the broad questions above. People want the “Tool Box” to include alternatives for farmland preservation, affordable housing, protecting water quality, safe development on steep slopes, and a number of other hot-button topics. And they want solutions to fit the character of their communities and to serve long-range economic development strategies as well as shorter-range goals. Better long-range planning was mentioned in just about every session. But there were also plenty of folks who wanted to be on record as concerned about going too far with new rules: Do we want to risk throwing construction workers out of jobs with restrictions that inhibit new building? Is the problem with uncontrolled development really as big as some say?

To get a feel for the range of perspectives from the Forums, click on the county tabs on the tool bar above.

The top concerns expressed during the Forums have already found their way into topics for meetings during the weeklong public charrette, May 13-20, at Western Carolina University. To see the complete schedule, go here.

All sessions are open to the public. The charrette team is hoping for multi-day participation from many participants. Of course, folks interested in particular topics can pick days and times that are convenient to them.

Each afternoon at 5:30, the charrette team will stage a “pin-up” of work in progress so that team members and the public can follow the charrette through each day. Furthermore, this website will be updated on a daily basis so those watching the process from a distance can observe and comment. The final presentation on the night of Tuesday, May 20, will feature the first rough draft of the regional “Tool Box.”

Running simultaneously with the larger “Tool Box” charrette are charrettes-within-the-charrette addressing representative projects that demonstrate how tools in the “Tool Box” might be applied in actual places and in actual situations. Sponsors of model projects, from a coalition of non-profits and property owners in Cashiers to a developer in Haywood County to a family farmer in Cherokee County, have proposed their projects with the idea of representing key challenges in the region and with the intention of implementing the charrette’s plans as soon as possible. Two of the model projects – a “village character” planning charrette for Cashiers and a “cultural landscape” strategy for a portion of the Little Tennessee River in Macon County – will stage satellite charrettes on location. To see schedules for the Cowee and Cashiers satellite charrettes, go here.

For more details on the model projects and preparations for the May 13 start-up of this groundbreaking planning workshop, check the website regularly.

April 2, 2008 -- Let’s talk about ways you feel connected to the landscapes of Western North Carolina.

Do you sense changes that may influence those connections?

Tell us about the future. And how would you like to see those connections maintained or enhanced?

That’s the kind of conversation we’ve been having with citizens of North Carolina’s mountain region since November. No lecturing. No debating over planning particulars. Just open-ended conversations about what we value about where we live.

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From those conversations, involving some 70 people in the mountain region, Mountain Landscapes outreach director Gabe Cumming has produced a short documentary we’ll use to take the conversation to the next step. (To see and hear a sample, go here.)

Throughout April, we’re holding extended Community Forums in each of the seven westernmost counties and the Qualla Boundary. For a complete schedule, go here. During the drop-in part of the Forum day, citizens come by on their own time, see the documentary and offer their reactions and ideas to MLI organizers one-on-one. We’re also encouraging everyone who can to attend the meetings that end each day’s Forum session. At those meetings, there will be group showings of the documentary and facilitated discussions about how the documentary does or does not represent a broad range of citizen hopes and concerns.

We’ll also ask folks to get a little more specific about their priorities for coping with changes they see; because after the April Forum sessions, we want to have a prioritized list of issues that citizens want property owners, builders, developers, and governments to address during a seven-day public workshop May 13-20 at Western Carolina University.

The agenda for that public workshop – called a “charrette” – is driven by citizen concerns. Which puts it firmly in synch with the goals and origins of the Mountain Landscape Initiative (see our previous posting below).

So come to one or more of the Community Forums. And tell your friends. For a downloadable flyer with the schedule for all the Forums, go here. Feel free to print it out and distribute it to friends.

The Mountain Landscapes Initiative is enjoying unprecedented support in the regional media but we need informal networks of neighbors, co-workers, and friends to build the kind of long-term support for this historic effort and for the “Tool Box” it will produce.

March 10, 2008 – Tourism, second home development, and retiree migration are driving impressive growth in North Carolina’s western mountain region. And no wonder. The region’s attractions are legion. The East’s highest mountains and the South’s most dramatic rivers are here. It is sacred ground for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. And historic small towns and rolling farmland survive here after having long disappeared in most areas of the U.S. Yet growth has come at such a volume and such a pace it threatens to undermine the assets that make the area so appealing.

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Can Western North Carolina harness this growth to provide opportunity for its citizens and still be the place that has inspired residents and visitors for generations?

The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina and the Southwestern Commission, non-profits with different missions but similar hopes for the region’s future, believe the answer to that question is yes. They have joined together to introduce an historic planning process in the mountain counties: The Mountain Landscapes Initiative (MLI), with a pilot project to create a “Tool Box” to guide planning and development.

Because of its geographic sweep, the seven westernmost counties and their 16 municipalities, the project is an ambitious one. But its mission is straightforward: Over the course of a year, get a sense of the concerns and hopes of citizens and their leaders, organize those issues into an agenda for an idea-sorting workshop, and deliver a manual of tools for facing the challenges and maximizing the opportunities.

For a slightly more detailed explanation of the MLI and the “Tool Box,” go here. And for a context-setting description of its broader goals, see the Request for Proposals sent to prospective consulting teams.

The process began in the summer of 2007 with a Growth Management Workshop organized by the Southwestern Commission in Macon County. Some 50 elected officials and staffers from the seven-county region ranked key issues and agreed that a region-wide approach to potential solutions made sense. The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina, meanwhile, was drafting the proposal for the Mountain Landscapes Initiative for the 18 Western North Carolina counties it serves. With a regional planning discussion already underway in the far western counties, The Community Foundation partnered with the Southwestern Commission to begin the MLI with the “Tool Box” pilot.

By November of 2007, Gabriel Cumming, Ph.D., was busy with the first stage of the MLI pilot, interviewing some 40 residents of the region about their connections to the landscape, their concerns, and their hopes for the future. This effort refined and expanded an earlier project that successfully used similar interview techniques.

Cumming and Carla Norwood, a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, edited the interviews into a short documentary. That documentary will be the centerpiece for a series of community meetings in April in the seven counties and in the Qualla Boundary of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. At those meetings, facilitators will help citizens organize their reactions to the documentary into a to-do list for a May workshop called a “charrette.”

At the charrette, a team of experts in planning, architecture, engineering, environmental science, and other specialties will work with citizens to attack the to-do list and draft the “Tool Box.”

Some members of the consulting team will be assigned to model projects chosen because they represent challenges faced by developers or individuals or jurisdictions throughout the region. By focusing on the models, the charrette team can demonstrate real-life applications of the tools they’re developing for the “Tool Box.”

Within a year after The Community Foundation’s first draft of its Mountain Landscapes Initiative proposal and the Southwestern Commission’s June, 2007, Growth Management Workshop, citizens and leaders in the seven western counties and in the Qualla Boundary will have a how-to manual for coping with growth.

From its outset, The Mountain Landscapes Initiative attracted applause and editorial endorsements from regional media. Return regularly to the pages on this site to follow its progress.