What happens next?

Now that we've held two community meetings to provide guidance for the Citizens' Committee on the Champlain Parkway, we're ready to get to work! Here's what will happen over the next three or four months:

We build the committee.  Now that both meetings are done, we’ll sit down and take a look at the names of all the folks who offered to serve on the committee.  From those names, we’ll do our best to identify seven or eight people who, taken together, represent the full range of needs and interests related to this project.  We will then contact those folks and ask them to serve, and we’ll also contact everyone else who volunteered to thank them for being willing.


The committee starts working.  We’ll start with a detailed review of the plans as they stand.  Then we’ll look for places where the plans do and don’t line up with the needs and ideas that came out of these two community meetings.  Finally, we’ll take a step back, review what we’ve learned, and brainstorm a whole bunch of potential changes to the project.

The committee does a reality check.  We’ll meet with project engineers to go through our list of ideas and weed out things that simply won’t work from an engineering standpoint.  We’ll also take out anything that would re-open the federal approval process.  Then we’ll look at what we’ve got left and see how it fits together.

The community weighs in.  We’ll post to the blog our first pass at a list of changes – the end product of the process outlined above –and ask for feedback and guidance.  Based on what we hear, we’ll revise and rework.

The committee-community dialogue goes through more rounds.  We’ll keep going back and forth until the consensus on the committee is that we’ve arrived at a package of proposed changes that does the best possible job of balancing all the needs that have been expressed, within the constraints of what is possible.

We present our recommendations to the City.  Perhaps to the Public Works Commission, perhaps to the City Council – wherever makes most sense.  We’ll also publicize our findings via the media, share them with the state and the feds, and generally serve as advocates for whatever community vision has emerged.