Siloam Springs makes ‘plan’ for future
SILOAM SPRINGS — The City Board and the Planning Commission held a joint workshop March 2 to discuss the 2040 Comprehensive Plan.
Also in attendance were Freese and Nichols Project Manager Dawn Warrick and Catalyst Commercial Owner Jason Claunch, who would be working with the city on the new comprehensive plan.
Warrick and her team would work with the city and the public to help design the plan and Reid Cleeter, Claunch and Catalyst director of operations, would help with the economic component of the project, Warrick said.
Warrick presented a power point to give the board and planning commission an overview of where they were in the project, as well as discussing their meeting with the Plan Advisory Committee and several stakeholders earlier that day.
A stakeholder is anyone who has a stake in the future of the city, Warrick said. This includes people who live, work, shop and visit, she said.
Both Warrick and Claunch stressed the importance of public input.
“We will have community outreach in various formats,” Warrick said. “We’re trying to ensure that we present things in multiple ways so that people will feel comfortable with one or more of those ways to connect with the project.”
Ways to engage the community include joint workshops with the board and planning commission, stakeholder interviews, committee meetings community open house and surveys. There is a survey available until April 12 for people to take on the plan’s website siloamsprings2040.com, Warrick said.
During the presentation, Warrick and Claunch focused on an overview of the planning process; community snapshot and context; economic development; community values; an overview of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats exercise; an overview of the visioning exercise; and an introduction to the project’s website.
Several city board members commented on the presentation. Director David Allen asked if the population was expected to be 28,000 in
2040.
Allen said Warrick had three choices in population projecting and went with the highest number. Warrick said she accidentally jumped to the farthest side of the column. The correct number ranged between 22,850 and
25,334, the presentation states. Allen also asked why there were only eight responses to the questions on community values. Warrick said the responses came from the committee members and after the survey was finished a few additional committee members responded so the total respondents were 11 or
12, Warrick said.
Allen made another comment on the public survey, asking Warrick how she intended to get the word out to all residents and why the survey ended so quickly.
“This has always been the problem in that when we’ve done things like this is that there is a huge population of older people that just don’t even do any social media and many of them don’t even do online and so you’ve got to go back to the hard copy stuff to reach some of these people,” Allen said.
Warrick said the cutoff date was tentative but can be extended if it is necessary.
“We can extend it if we feel like we’re not getting enough distribution or just blank straight responses,” Warrick said.
Director Mindy Hunt also asked Warrick whether she considered reaching out to some of the business and Director Lesa Rissler recommended placing notice about the survey in utility billing.
Don Clark, Community Development director, said the city would put links leading to the survey on library computers and have paper copies of the survey available at the community development building and city hall. Clark has also discussed using utility billing and meeting with taxi riders who take part in the city’s taxi program, he said.
Director Carol Smiley asked what the normal percentage response was and whether there is data from the 2020 Census. Warrick said the data from the census would not be available until mid-2022 and said response rates range wildly in different communities.
Freese and Nichols set a goal of getting 1,000 people to respond to the survey, Warrick said.
Ted Song, planning commissioner, said he didn’t see a listing in the demographics portion for LatinX and said 30 percent of kids in the city fall into that category. Warrick said there was representation on the committee for the LatinX community as well as the School District so they would make an effort to emphasize that.