City planning reflects differences between Texarkanas
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is the first in a fivepart series examining the long-range plans for the two Texarkanas. Other stories in the series, which will examine transportation, economic development, downtown and water needs/plans, will appear in the Friday through Monday editions.
TEXARKANA — One formalized, the other more a philosophy, the city planning efforts of Texarkana, Texas, and Texarkana, Arkansas, reflect how economic realities differ between them.
With resources available to develop a long-term plan, the Texas side has well-established goals for everything from land use to urban design. Across the state line where the budget is smaller, the Arkansas side’s plans are looser and play out on a case-by-case basis, seeing after immediate needs.
“We’re in short-term planning operations. We review subdivisions and conditional use permits and that type of thing. But as far as actual planning, most of what we do is creating spaces for things to happen, and then reaching out,” Arkansas-side City Planner Mary Beck said.
The last time the Arkansas side created a comprehensive plan and revised its zoning ordinances was 1988. Because of a lack of funding since then, the city has never realized perennial intentions to hire a long-term planning consultant.
Beck takes the city’s financial difficulties as a challenge.
“Actually it’s kind of interesting in a way, that being in the situation we’re in, there’s a lot more creativity that’s come into play, as far as getting things done. We have to figure out ways to problem-solve and look at what resources we have and utilize those in a way that’s beneficial,” she said.
Finding uses for the Municipal Auditorium is an example of that philosophy at work. Beck said plans for the historic space include live streaming performances there via the internet. All manner of creative work, not just music, is a good fit for the venue, she said.
“We’re kind of creating an environment that invites participation. It’s kind of like a book that’s written with enough space for the reader to put themselves into it,” Beck said, referring not only to the auditorium but also to other efforts such as the downtown entertainment district recently established. “When you have that creativity, it feeds on itself; it grows. That’s what the opportunity is here.”
On the Texas side, a recent planning push has yielded results that make envisioning the city’s future easier.
After an almost two-year process of producing its new comprehensive plan—a master guide titled “Renew Texarkana”—City Hall’s attention has turned toward executing it. As Director of Planning and Community Development David Orr said, “This is not just a plan that sits on the shelf.”
When in June 2016 Texarkana, Texas, began the process of updating its comprehensive plan, it had been 15 years since the last revision, plenty of time for significant changes in the city that required some new thinking.
Ten to 20 years between revisions is typical among city planners, Orr said, though it is probably better to revisit comprehensive plans more frequently—at interims lengthy enough for them to be long-term but short enough to be responsive to change.
To help with overhauling the plan, the city contracted with Richardson, Texas-based consulting firm Halff Associates Inc., which began by conducting about 30 stakeholder interviews with Texarkana leaders to gain early insight into the community’s needs. Questions related to the city’s character, resources, challenges and opportunities.
Speaking to the consultants gave interviewees a chance to express things they may not have wanted to say to city officials. With a third party, “it’s a different tone; you get a different response sometimes,” Orr said.
The next step was to form an eight-member steering committee, which “did a lot of the heavy lifting,” Orr said.
Experts and everyone else who participated in developing the plan agreed that an essential step was to involve those who would be affected by it.
From the stakeholder interviews, Halff defined nine goal themes and then 54 potential strategic goals to be presented at public workshops and outreach events.
During three workshops, as well as another opportunity during the annual downtown fundraiser Dine on the Line, hundreds of residents heard presentations about different possibilities for the plan and then voted on their priorities, narrowing the list of goals as they went.
After taking all participants’ preferences into account, Halff and city staff finalized the comprehensive plan in a 250-page document. The City Council granted its official approval for the plan in spring 2018.
In its broadest strokes, the comprehensive plan seeks to create a number of mixed-use activity hubs across the city that create synergy by combining education and business activities, producing economic
opportunity and a high quality of life for residents.
“If there was a preferred scenario that took precedence over the others, it was the business/education, economic focus. And so we added this future land use of business/ education centers to really focus on existing education opportunities with Texarkana College, with A&MTexarkana, with our school districts. And then also workforce development opportunities, and then ultimately job creation and business opportunities within some of those same nodes. … It’s an approach that’s proven to work throughout the country,” Orr said.
A common concern is that the new plan will be just another pie-in-thesky statement of aspirations that fails to result in any actual change. But making it real is ensured not only by City Hall’s commitment to it, but also by state law that requires a city’s zoning decisions to be based on just such a comprehensive plan.
“Any time you start this planning effort, everyone automatically comes and says, ‘Wait a minute, didn’t we just do a strategic plan?’ or ‘Didn’t we just have some sort of big planning effort five years ago? Whatever happened to that?’ Well, the comprehensive plan is truly a legal document that’s used every single zoning case. So it’s not a plan for the shelf,” Orr said.
Various city departments are already busy executing an implementation strategy that spells out short-, mid- and long-term projects that follow the plan, and staff must report the status of those projects to the City Council annually. For example, the recent conversion of East Third and East Fourth streets from one-way to two-way was part of the downtown portion of the comprehensive plan.
The public’s awareness of the plan should also help ensure that city officials are held to it.
“There’s accountability built in,”
Orr said.