On the last Monday night in January, a standing-room-only crowd packed the cafeteria of the oldest continuously used school in Georgia, now known as the Wynnton Arts Academy.

Adults sat hunched over child-sized seats while participating in one of a series of Community Visioning Workshops held by Columbus Consolidated Government to help develop the Comprehensive Plan 2028. The 20-year period in which this year’s state-mandated plan comes to fruition will truly test how progress and preservation mesh locally as the region prepares itself for unprecedented, but hopefully not unbridled, growth.

A mix of concerned citizens, stakeholders and power brokers, the group assembled at Wynnton represented that night’s designated planning areas: Midtown, Uptown, Bibb City, North Highlands and Beallwood. These neighborhoods, comprising the city’s historic core, while diverse in many regards, share the fact that their precincts voted in favor of the tax-allocation district (TAD) initiative last fall, which unsuccessfully sought to increase investment and improve infrastructure in many of those same areas. That vote proved a rare instance in local elections when ballots were cast not on typical racial and socio-economic lines, but ones based on neighborhood. New versus old. Urban versus suburban.

As such, the vocal group offered up a variety of interesting answers to questions that sought to measure the city’s priorities as it plans for the next 20 years. While crime and public safety issues
garnered the most reaction, the group’s survey answers — calculated instantaneously via remote and displayed in bar graphs on a screen — revealed such unique ideas as favoring improved sidewalks and bike paths over access to Alabama, and that the necessary capital investments to fund the comprehensive plan should be derived from an increased tax base resulting from economic development.

While such public-input meetings are often more about philosophies than actual practices, a pointed question posed by Catherine Prior, an ecologist with The Nature Conservancy, to Rick Jones, the city’s director of planning, perhaps revealed what local officials hope to achieve through the Community Visioning Workshop process.

Prior raised a concern with projected figures that predicted rapid population growth in currently under-developed portions of Muscogee County, while the older neighborhoods’ estimates were relatively stagnant.

“Is that the plan, or is that just a projection?” Prior asked.

“That’s just projection,” Jones answered. “What we’re hoping to achieve is a plan that follows not those projections, but rather what the community wants. We want a plan that really has some teeth in it.”

Virginia Peebles sat quietly in….

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