(bright music) (joyful music) - Thanks for joining us.

I'm Fred Martino.

In focus today, Plan Carbondale.

It is a major effort by the city to gather feedback for a new comprehensive plan.

Full disclosure, before we begin, I am part of a diverse steering committee, helping the city with suggestions and outreach.

I also have a master's degree in public administration and have provided input for a variety of community development ideas in other places where I've lived.

To learn more about Plan Carbondale, I am very pleased to welcome Carbondale Senior Planner, Molly Maxwell.

Molly, it is great to have you with us.

- Thanks so much for having me.

- Good to have you here today.

You know, people may hear this, the idea of a comprehensive plan and think, well, I have ideas, but what exactly is a comprehensive plan?

Before we get into specifics of it, give us an idea of why the city is doing this.

And we know communities all over the country do comprehensive plans.

Why do a comprehensive plan?

- Right.

Like you say, communities all over the country have comprehensive plans, states have comprehensive plans, counties have comprehensive plans.

Carbondale has had comprehensive plans since at least the '70s.

So what a lot of people might not know at this point is we have one in place that was updated in 2010, so we're still operating off of that one.

And it's basically just a guiding policy document.

It's really meant to gather information from the community, what the community wants, what the community's priorities are.

And then our policy makers, our city council people and mayor can make decisions based on that information.

It's often largely development-based, land-based, but we have other components as well.

So we're really looking at things like housing, transportation, economic development, parks and recreation, all those things that make the city a city.

- Okay.

And as you point out, this is an advisory document.

It helps guide decisions, gives folks background on what the community is saying is important, and also part of the planning process.

But eventually it'll be the mayor, the city council, that have to vote on what actually happens, right?

- Yeah, exactly.

That's a great point.

So it doesn't make any final decisions on its own, but it helps guide the documents that do, so our city budget, for example, our city code.

So those are the hard and fast things that make the city run on a day-to-day basis and a lot of those policy decisions, again, come from the comprehensive planning process.

- Very interesting.

Well, as you said, Carbondale's current comprehensive plan dates back to 2010, so about 15 years ago.

Give us an idea of how often plans like this, 'cause we know these occur as you said, all over the country, how often they're updated and what's changed since then that requires an update?

It's 15 years, that's a long time.

- It sure is a long time.

And I think it's pretty general practice to update it every 15 years, although we're hearing now that it's more like 10 years that they recommend for a major update.

And then we're also supposed to be reviewing it on a five year basis, so making minor updates and changes sort of on our own every five years.

But yeah, I mean, think back to 2010, a lot has changed since then.

You know, we've had our pandemic a few years ago and still feeling the effects of that and that has changed all components that are covered in the comprehensive plan.

We've seen sort of a downturn in population numbers and is sort of stagnant now.

But so much has changed since then and it really needs an update.

Not to mention again, that community input, our community has changed.

We have a lot more people that have come of age to participate at this time that might not have been around at that time.

So we're looking for new input, new data to kind of address the issues of today.

- Yeah, absolutely.

So the timeline for getting the feedback for this plan and creating that plan is fairly short.

Spring of 2025.

Tell us how that can be accomplished.

- It's pretty amazing, really.

And for that, we really are leaning hard on our planning consultants.

So we have a great consulting firm that we're working with called Planning Next and they are all planners.

There's three of 'em that work with us very closely.

And they're really creating the backbone of the plan, facilitating our meetings and gathering the data and then they'll be doing a lot of putting the data into the actual document and then helping with analysis.

I talk with them pretty much every week but they're really doing a lot of work behind the scenes as well.

So once they have a bunch of their data, you know, we also gave them data, just hard data like map data from our records that help them with the creation of the future land use map and things like that.

S they're kind of hard at work all the time working on this.

- And I feel very honored and fortunate 'cause I've gotten to hear them speak about this process being part of the steering committee.

And it was very interesting, you know, all of the elements of the plan.

And I'm also impressed with the various ways you're trying to get inputs, because I think that's really important.

It will, I would think, add more investment by the community in what eventually is approved by the council.

- For sure.

And it's an art all on its own, public engagement and gathering public input.

So we're really exploring all avenues.

I think just the creation of the steering committee itself was really eye-opening.

You know, there's 19 of you and really, we opened the applications up to everybody and we saw a huge response, which was really promising knowing that so many people wanted to be involved.

And I've met a lot of new people that I wouldn't have otherwise met through that process.

So if you just had a few people, like a few city employees that were creating this plan on their own, they would have a very narrow window of focus.

We really need to expand our horizons and expand the communities that we're reaching out to.

Each steering committee member has their own sub community within Carbondale that they can reach out to and share these opportunities with so we're really leaning hard on you all as well.

- Okay.

Very good.

Well, one of the other things that's very nice is that even for folks who, for instance, might be watching this who can't attend a meeting in person, they still can provide input because you have a wonderful website that you've set up to explain the process and also get input.

It's called PlanCarbondale.com.

So very easy to remember.

- [Molly] Yeah, I thought we'd keep it simple.

- Good you got that URL, PlanCarbondale.com.

I wanna review some of the questions and get an idea of what you expect to hear as responses to these questions.

The first question, very general question, but a really important one.

And what kind of drove my interest in being part of the steering committee 'cause I thought this is an important question.

How can we make places in Carbondale more attractive, comfortable, or inviting, or all three, right?

- Right.

Yeah, it's a huge question.

I think some people might be a little intimidated by this question because it's so broad.

So if you are, I myself think of specific places or maybe one specific place that you like to go to.

Or even if you've gone on a trip somewhere else and you've seen something that you really liked in another city or town and think about changes that could be made in Carbondale to create places like that.

Again, it's a very broad question and like we were talking earlier, we think that, well, the city only has so much control over things like that.

But at this point in the information gathering phase, we really don't wanna limit people's thinking into what can the city do versus what can't the city do.

Really we want all ideas big and small, just basically what would make your day-to-day life more comfortable or more enjoyable in Carbondale?

- Absolutely.

And I love the fact that, as you mentioned, people who may have lived in another community may have ideas based on their experience elsewhere.

So one of the things that at a steering committee meeting that I mentioned that is basic and it may not come first to mind for a lot of people, but it did for me, was I moved from an area where all new developments had sidewalks.

And I thought that is really something I didn't appreciate as much as I do after having that, that right now I walk where I live and there are no sidewalks.

So especially at night, I am quickly moving into driveways when I see cars coming.

It's a safety issue, it's an issue of mobility 'cause people do walk places to get places, not just for exercise, and then it is also encouraging exercise and recreation and being outside.

So that's one example, but there are so many.

And I was struck by, you mentioned that the city can't necessarily do something about all of the suggestions, but they can make it easier and make it part of a goal and a plan, for instance, to encourage economic development so that in terms of the access and attractiveness of the community to have more opportunity for businesses and other attractions.

- Exactly.

Something that we're really seeing with buildings, commercial and residential, is a lot of buildings are really getting older and sort of aging out of our current regulations and codes for safety and plumbing and things like that.

So something that the city's done recently that does directly help businesses is we started funding improvements for downtown buildings.

And so they've already spent all of the money allotted this fiscal year for that but you've seen several businesses move into the downtown and reopening and for example, PK's and their restrooms, that was city funds and from the TIFF program that helped them get up to code and get up to standard.

You know, those are really expensive projects that probably most small businesses just couldn't afford.

And so it's things like that that you might think, well, the city can't make a business open or move, but we can do things like that to help businesses.

- Okay.

So here's another question that's on the online survey.

What kind of housing do you think Carbondale needs for the future?

- Yeah, this is a hard one as well.

But I would encourage people to just think about their own experience, the experience of their friends and family.

If you've been looking for a house recently and can't find what it is you're looking for, if you feel that housing should be more affordable or whatever your experience is, we want to hear it.

Again, as city staff, we hear anecdotally pretty frequently people's personal experiences but again, that's just a very small portion of the people that come into our office and are applying for our housing programs or even getting a fence permit or something like that.

But we are meeting people on a pretty regular basis that are moving here to Carbondale from other locations.

So again, we wanna hear it all.

We wanna hear from people that have lived here their whole lives, people that just moved here last week, what they wanna see.

- Yeah.

And of course, it is nationally a more difficult issue for communities all over the country to deal with because we've had such an enormous amount of inflation in terms of housing, particularly in the last five years.

It's far exceeded inflation in other areas.

- Sure, it has.

And that's really something that I think everywhere is struggling with.

We're in a bit of a bubble here in Carbondale and southern Illinois because our actual housing prices haven't skyrocketed like in a lot of other places but we still are seeing high interest rates in mortgages and our property taxes, you know, elephant in the room kind of thing.

But that still doesn't really tell us where we're at at a local level.

The city recently initiated a housing non-for-profit.

And so they will be working on just housing projects, but they need this data too.

I'm sure they'll be doing some of their own more comprehensive housing data analysis, but the comprehensive plan, bringing it all back to Plan Carbondale, we just need to see what the community needs in terms of housing before we start throwing a bunch of money in the wrong direction.

- Right, and it also, as you pointed out earlier, may have an impact upon zoning and other issues where rental housing is available, the type of rental housing in addition to homes that people own, single family homes and multi-family homes, those sorts of things.

So another online question, this is an important issue.

How could it be easier to move around Carbondale and get to where you want to go?

What are you looking for there?

- Yeah, so transportation, it's another major component of our day-to-day lives.

Just thinking about how you move around town on the daily, like to get to your work, to get to shopping, grocery shopping, get to the places that you wanna go and a lot of us have cars, but we want to expand people's idea of transportation and I think it's been found in the 2010 comprehensive plan, and I'm sure comprehensive plans before that, that bikeability around Carbondale is really a priority.

So the last comprehensive plan led to the creation of a bike master plan that we did in 2016 and that actually identified specific priorities for like where we need to see bike lanes, where we need to see multi-use paths.

And so that has guided a lot of the work that I do for the city.

So now we know what grants to apply for and where to focus that energy because then the bike plan, it takes a more narrow focus at just bike infrastructure but again, we have that public input component.

So again, we just always wanna hear from the public and where they're wanting to see focus and priorities.

- Yeah.

And one major thing that's already been done even before this plan, the new transportation center for trains and buses.

How do you think this will help in terms of transportation in the area?

- It's huge.

You know, just making those connections between Amtrak, between our train line and all the local bus, public transit entities I think will really help folks.

You know, they might not want to go to downtown Carbondale, that might not be their final destination.

So if they're coming in on the train, then they'll be able to more easily take a bus and figure out what bus it is that they wanna take and get to their final leg of their trip.

So yeah, we're hoping that the SIMMS and transportation development in general kind of takes away some of the barriers from using public transportation or bikes or micro mobility so people don't feel like they just have to use their cars all the time.

- Yeah.

If you are in your car and you're going west on 13, you see the new transportation center which is called Multimodal because of the trains and the buses right there on the right.

And then I just noticed this week on the left, just after you pass that, you see another major construction project where there is the construction underway of a new entertainment center by the city, a new place for folks to gather to see events and things.

So another part perhaps of what you'll be hearing in your feedback.

- Exactly.

And that came from the planning process as well.

So in our downtown master plan that came out of the last comprehensive plan, one of the recommendations for that was an entertainment center.

So we probably wouldn't have applied for or received that funding if we didn't have a document showing that that was a priority for the community.

- Well, hopefully these kind of attractions will help to also attract more in the way of businesses in downtown.

We've had some empty businesses in the city.

A lot of people as a result are talking about the need for development, ways to encourage development in Carbondale.

Tell me how that might be included in this comprehensive plan.

- Sure.

Well, honestly, our economic development team already has their economic development plan that they're working on.

But we really see planning and economic development, really, if you think of a Venn diagram, there's a lot of overlap between what our two departments do.

And so we all feel very strongly that a stronger community will promote economic development and vice versa, right?

So I think the economic development plan that is in the works, it focuses a lot too on downtown development and walkability and bikeability and those quality of life things because we really want people to enjoy living here and be content in their day-to-day lives.

And that promotes economic development and vice versa.

So it all ties together.

- Yeah.

And of course, in addition to generating economic activity, the city is always looking for grant funding as well to try to help develop things that you had told me before we went on the air.

You were involved in a grant.

Then folks are seeing the results of that just outside the city.

- Sure.

Yeah.

So again, I'll bring it back to the bike stuff because that's what I focus the most on.

But from our bike master plan, one of the projects that got recommended was the regional bike plan to connect Murphysborough, Carbondale, Marion, and people see that parts of that project really coming together on the east side of town and the west side of town.

So we applied for funding from the state, the ITEP program, Illinois Transportation Enhancement Program, which we've been very successful with.

We applied for that in 2020 and we got it.

And here it is 2024 and we're seeing the construction of it.

So that's another good lesson in sometimes we have to be a little patient in how long these things take.

The input that we're gonna get for the comprehensive plan we might not see the outcomes of some of those things for quite a long time but we gotta be patient and trust that some of it will happen.

- It must be very rewarding to see the fruits of your labor on that grant now west of the downtown area, seeing the ground get broken and the work being done on the bike trail there.

- It's pretty amazing.

Yeah, it's great to see.

It'll be even better to see once it's been complete and seeing people use it.

We completed another bike path recently, the Mud Line, named after the old railroad bed that it was built on, sort of on the northwest part of town.

And that funding had been applied for before I even was with the city.

So I can't take any credit for that, but yeah, just seeing people ride on it every day is really rewarding.

- I bet it is.

Molly, thank you so much for being with us today.

- Thanks so much for having me.

- Great to have you here.

My guest was Carbondale Senior Planner Molly Maxwell.

You can provide input for the city's comprehensive plan online at PlanCarbondale.com.

That is where you will also find lots of other information.

For everyone at WSIU, I'm Fred Martino.

Have a great week.

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