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River Forks Downtown Plan Update

Grand Forks and East Grand Forks
Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO)

The planning and evaluation process

The planning process will include:

• Workshop-style SRC meetings with an organized process for directing consultants and recording decisions
• Facilitated discussion sessions at SRC meetings to develop, evaluate and prioritize new specific downtown plans and projects
• Public issues and opportunities workshops
• Project website or web page
• Interviews with downtown individuals
• Focus group sessions with key stakeholders to gain insight and understanding
• e-Newsletters and press releases
• Design visualizations; illustrative plan, perspective and cross-sectional views of proposed recommendations
• Public open houses to display and discuss updated downtown plans
• City Council updates

Evaluation: a multi-layered screening and evaluation process

It is expected that issues, opportunities, proposed recommendations and implementation steps for updating the downtown plans will be subjected to a multi-layered screening and evaluation process. Establishing these evaluation criteria will be an important task in working with the SRC.

Evaluation criteria include factors such as:

• Impacts on land use, transportation and community character
• Is the action supported by current framework plan visions and goals such as improving economic vitality, housing diversity or walkability?
• Is the action supported by the current plan’s design principles and policies such as strengthening connections to the riverfront or pedestrian/bicycle connectivity between the two communities?
• Will the action serve as a catalyst, spurning other beneficial activities?
• Do the actions leverage previous accomplishments such as new retail targeted to the growing downtown residential population?
• What are the financial implications: capital cost vs. long-term maintenance, return on investment, funding gap, etc.?
• Are the actions sustainable over the long term?
  

Issues and opportunities will be evaluated using nominal group techniques and SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunity, threat) analysis as a part of the initial SRC meeting, stakeholder focus groups and communitywide meetings. Issue and opportunity groupings will be synthesized into a set of potential actions or implementation steps. The implementation steps will be organized into a matrix format to be compared against the evaluation criteria. Once the implementation steps have been evaluated and refined by the SRC and consultants, they will be incorporated into the draft updated framework plans for additional discussion and refinement by each community during the public open house and formal City Council stages of the project.

Find out more about this project:

• Project background
• Planning and evaluation process
• Open Houses and Workshops
• Press releases
• Contacts