Help to develop the Beach’s future tonight
What will Estero Island look like in the future? Can you envision the Beach in 10 to 25 years?
That is what officials from the Town of Fort Myers Beach and Larue Planning & Management Services will be asking tonight (June 20) at 6 p.m.
Anyone and everyone is encouraged to come out to Bay Oaks Gymnasium for the second part of a planning process called “Vision Our Town” at the Community Visioning Workshop. It will serve as the second phase of evaluating and improving the Town’s Comprehensive Plan, a blueprint for how development will occur in the future and what the Beach community may look like during that time.
Community input is vital to make this process a reality. Attendees will review preliminary results of the public input surveys, identify community issues, develop alternatives and establish priorities in an effort to evaluate and improve the Town’s development process
“What we are hoping to do is take the priorities that people established in the first workshop and narrow them down into more distinctive priorities,” said Town Planning Coordinator Tina Ekblad. “For example what exactly does ‘Keep it Funky’ mean. Hopefully we can take that and make some language, policy and direction from that for the future.”
Community Development Director Walter Fluegel echoed those comments and said this workshop’s participants will have a chance to voice their opinions on more than one topic.
“Once we prioritize, we’re going to try to define and refine further in terms of what people meant,” he said. “There will be a list of options and people will be able to rank them again. People will be able to work their way around to each subgroup and get a shot at commenting about each subject. From there, we will try to narrow down what people mean.”
Roughly 40 people attended the first part of the visioning workshop. More Beach residents, visitors or anyone else with suggestions are welcome to attend and participate.
“This entire process is based on community participation and their ideas. There is nothing that is too crazy or outlandish,” said Ekblad. “If we don’t hear it, we don’t know that they are open to it. That’s the reality. We can guide them, but the fix and solution has to come from them. We want this workshop input to be reflective of the community.”
Since town officials sent a flyer in a mailer to each resident in their Beach Water statements, more than 140 surveys from last workshop have been filled out.
“We’re really hoping for a good turnout on this one, because we got a lot of really great stuff out of the last workshop and surveys,” said Fluegel. “Afterwards, we are going to take what we hear from this workshop and do another survey. When we found out we had 140-150 survey results, we realized this is working and people are engaged.”
Survey results from the first workshop are still being broken down and responses on the surveys are being evaluated. Once the second workshop is in the books, Town staff will review the community’s prioritization and send a letter to the Department of Economic opportunity for stature requirement.
“That letter will highlight the community-identified issues and the process we will go through to address them,” Ekblad said. “We will ID the elements of the comp plan that the issues relate to, then we’ll start working on editing language.”
Once that process is complete, another set of public meetings can be expected.
“We’ll present all the information to the Local Planning Agency and Town Council and do a series of public meetings to show the people the results and ask if we got it right or wrong and their general feelings about the process,” said Ekblad.
Workshop officials are still urging people to fill out the public input survey, which can be found online by clicking on the “Vision Our Town” release on the home page of the Town’s website at www.fortmyersbeachfl.gov or by picking one up at Town Hall.
“People appear to be pre-engaged in this process. So, we are trying to get as much opinion as we can and get a real consensus of what direction people are going in,” said Fluegel. “We may put up 10 different traffic solutions, and the input will tell us what we have to work on.”
For more information, call 765-0202.