A Crystall Ball
For The Roaring Fork Valley
Monday, May 8, 2000
Ah, to peer past the present and gaze into the future -- you could avoid that ankle-twisting pothole, sidestep the oncoming bus and best of all, place all the right bets.
The Orton Family Foundation, based in Rutland, Vermont, has arrived in the Roaring Fork Valley to test a new kind of planning software called CommunityViz.
The bottom line for local planners, and perhaps most importantly, for local residents whose eyes glaze over when the words "land use" are mentioned, the software could generate 3D computer-generated images of the future.
The idea is to plug in different scenarios for development, crank up the software, and gaze upon visual images of the outcome -- from traffic impacts to how it would look.
"Anything that would help people visualize better what can happen would be useful," said Carbondale planning director Mark Chain. "I'm pretty aware of what can happen because I know the business, but Joe Smith off the street might no know what a big project would look like, and what the cumulative impacts would look like."
The Orton Family Foundation is a non-profit group that develops tools "to assist citizens of rural America define the future, shape the growth and preserve the heritage of their communities."
When the foundation expanded its operation by establishing a Rocky Mountain Region headquarters in Steamboat Springs two years ago, two local planners attended an event and made connections that are paying off today.
Colin Laird, of the non-profit Healthy Mountain Communities, and Dave Michaelson, principal planner at OTAK/Rock Creek Studios, made the trip to Steamboat, and are now working together to test the new 3D software.
Michael Hassig, the chair of the Carbondale Planning and Zoning Commission, is on the advisory council for the Orton Foundation's Rocky Mountain Region.
A $44,000 grant from the Governor's Office of Energy Conservation in 1998, as well as local government funding, has been paying for a two phase "Scenario Planning Initiative" headed up by Healthy Mountain Communities.
Phase one was plugging in reams of data from up and down the valley on the number of homes and commercial area, population growth, traffic levels and much more.
Now that the "baseline" data is all in one place, Laird and Michaelson should be able to plug in a variety of possible futures, and the new software should be able to spit out what they will look like, visually speaking, and what the impacts are.
Laird expects the test will use data just from Carbondale, rather than all the regional data, "so we don't overwhelm the software," adding that the test should be done by August. One test might be to plug in scenarios envisioned in the town's new Master Plan.
"When people go to public meetings, the planning jargon and the maps on the wall can be very confusing," Laird said. "This should make planning a lot more accessible to community members."
Not only will the software generate visual images, it will generate statistics as well -- from future traffic counts to the cost of development to government.
"Understanding costs and consequences of how we grow is critical to quality of life down the road," Laird said.
If the test works well, the software could be used by various local governments.
"Orton's vision is to have this tool in the public domain," Laird said, adding that Healthy Mountain Communities will own a copy of the software when the test is done. It remains unclear if the software will be free to all comers, Laird said.
Certainly the Roaring Fork Valley Railroad Holding Authority would be interested in software that provide visual pictures of development scenarios, as the groups public transit planning depends on assumptions about increased traffic congestion. (RFRHA tried to obtain a federal grant to develop similar "scenario software" last year, but was unable to win the funding.)
A cadre of local planners, but private practitioners and public officials, have know at least since the early 1990s that the Roaring Fork Valley was ill-equipped to handle the development that was coming, and warned of impacts that would not be offset by existing government rules.
Now that development is there for all to see, the public seems to have taken a greater interest in how much more is coming. Public protests on the scale of those against Sanders Ranch in 1998 and in February 2000 simply didn't occur, at least in Garfield County, in years past.
Partly to get the public more involved in shaping the future, Healthy Mountain Communities obtained the Scenario Planning Initiative grant in 1998.