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Town of Normal, Illinois. Committed to Service Excellence.

Town of Normal 2030 Visioning Committee
Hile-Robins Advisory Group Report
March 2004

Advisory Group Participants

Clark Abraham, Ed Carroll, David Robins, Sue Baller-Shepard, Bob Connelly, Jean Robins, Bob Broad, Linda Healy, Caroline Wade, Laurine Brown, Julie Hile

Advisory Group’s DRAFT Vision Statement

The Town of Normal: People coming together to support quality living

Looking Back: What was Jesse Fell’s vision for Normal?

Jesse Fell envisioned Normal as a peaceful, meditative place with lots of trees (many of the oldest of which he planted himself). He wanted a physical space that “softened the prairie,” an “intellectual city on a hill,” a “place where thought [could] happen.” He was energized by evidence of the community and the universities growing together. He yearned for the integration of whites with African Americans. (With thanks to Bob Connelly and Greg Koos)

Town of Normal Opportunities

Let us say first that underlying each of the following opportunities is an acknowledgment that community involvement—as opposed to a more traditional closed-door, monological approach—while perpetually challenging and perhaps cumbersome, is the way to create the kind of Normal in which we all yearn to live in 2030. The method we’ve experienced through Jack and Chuck’s leadership of the 2030 Visioning Process stands for us as a model of the method by which we need to embrace opportunities like those we’ve listed below. Further, publicizing participative processes like this one is paramount to their success; if people don’t know citizens’ input is being sought and used, the perception is likely to be that it is not happening.

Please note that quotes from Advisory Group members sometimes follow our statements of “NEED.”

  1. Gross Town Product (GTP)/Quality of Life Indictor
    CONTRIBUTOR: Caroline Wade and the Hile-Robins Advisory Group

    OPPORTUNITY: Create and publicize the highest of community standards/actions related to the social and environmental quality of life.

    NEED: In the face of steady population growth, increases in production and consumption, and their corresponding pressures on social and environmental sustainability, the need to look at new ways to assess GTP that take the social and natural environments into account; the need to clearly articulate Normal’s commitment to the enhancement of its social/ environmental quality of life; and the need to show the Town’s Quality of Life performance as an integrated piece of its other responsibilities (i.e., money, goods, and services moving through the economy; safety and health; school rankings; family activities; affordable housing; recreational opportunities).

    DESCRIPTION:
    The Town would establish a commission which would learn about efforts (i.e. the World Bank, the United Nations, Norway, counties and cities across the globe) to integrate sustainability into rearticulated assessments of gross community performance. The commission would establish, track, document, and publish evidence of Town performance relative to “quality of life” goals, perhaps as a new GTP or as a QoL Indicator. QoL Indicator would be assessed annually and include qualitative as well as quantitative measures (i.e. a numeric scale). The indicator would be publicized on the Town’s website and included in its print and other electronic media communications/marketing materials.

    START UP: Constitute the commission and set it to learning, including benchmarking with other civic entities that have quality of life/sustainability indicators in play. Re-engineer Normal’s GTP or create a QoL Indicator, track and document corresponding performance, and publish results on the Town website.
     
  2. Green Belt
    CONTRIBUTOR: Bob Connelly and the Hile-Robins Advisory Group

    OPPORTUNITY: Redirect forces that are leading Normal to urban sprawl and control its constriction/definition by the sprawl of the City of Bloomington.

    NEED: The need to preserve the world’s richest farm land; the need to reframe the physical and psychological boundaries of the Town’s growth away from uncontrolled expansion and toward tactical, efficient, intentional use of space; the need of the Town’s citizens for significant, safe green spaces; the need to promote automobile-independent lifestyles; the need to reclaim and preserve the Midwestern prairie as a part of the Town’s heritage and legacy. “Nothing is ever inevitable. We must have this farm land.”

    DESCRIPTION: After the strategy used by Lake County to the north and by communities nation-wide who are engaged in urban renewal, acquire land and establish zoning that will protect a one-mile-wide the space as a “green belt” around the remaining open edges of the current Town of Normal limits. Trigger urban planning that flows back and forth within a defined set of boundaries and includes redevelopment/refinement of existing properties and spaces rather than accommodating unfettered expansion.

    START UP: City planners and zoning boards of Normal and Bloomington work with McLean County planners and local citizens to conduct a feasibility study relative to the viability of a green belt. Results of the study would be factored into long-range urban planning efforts, with a priority set to purchase the land and protect it from inappropriate development. Lessons learned from reclamation of the Constitution Trail, including fund raising through a Friends of the Green Belt effort might be considered.
     
  3. Mixed-Use Neighborhoods
    CONTRIBUTOR: Julie Hile and the Hile-Robins Advisory Group

    OPPORTUNITY: Combine our best experiences of a safe, familiar, physically close, relationship-rich past life with the new urbanism to reclaim elements of U.S. culture driven out by post-World War II principles of design advanced by van der Rohe, Gropius, and Le Corbusier.

    NEED: The need to unify the Town’s conservative and progressive voices/votes around an aesthetically pleasing, culturally rich, economically robust vision for its future; the need to enhance public safety; the need to integrate the Town across racial lines while preserving/celebrating ethnic differences; the need to keep commerce at home through support of locally-owned and -operated businesses.

    DESCRIPTION: Our Advisory Group members marveled at the similarities among our fondest memories of towns in which we grew up—this despite our having lived in rural and urban, coastal and inland, conservative and liberal, white collar and blue collar settings. We yearn for friendship, narrow streets, locally-owned stores to which we can walk or bike—and good mass transit when we can’t walk or bike—fresh food, green spaces, and the security that comes with a sense of community. We see Normal’s long-time experience of mixed-use neighborhoods as a good foundation on which to build the Town’s knowledge, skill, ability (KSA) and action related to the new urbanism, a movement that has demonstrated in many places worldwide the superior economic model of mixed-use zoning and development.

    START UP: Send a coalition from the Town of Normal, the City of Bloomington, and McLean County (citizens, council and zoning board members, developers) to the June 24-27, 2004 Congress for New Urbanism in Chicago with the charge of exploring cost-benefit of the approach and its applicability at this point in the Town/City/County’s development. Find and make good use of facilitators skilled in leading charette processes to broaden local dialogue about this issue as an extension of what the coalition learns in Chicago.
     
  4. Ethnic Strength
    CONTRIBUTOR: Susan Baller-Shepard and Hile-Robins Advisory Group

    OPPORTUNITY: Support Normal’s numerous well-established and sizable ethnic groups and encourage them to further shape their identities and their positive role in the Town.

    NEED: The need to push beyond racial tolerance to acknowledgment and celebration of Normal’s racial diversity; the need to partner across ethnic groups to ensure mutual respect and to explore out-of-the-box approaches to safe, peaceful urban coexistence; the need to ensure racial equality in Normal.

    DESCRIPTION: The Town of Normal is already rich with a variety of strongly represented ethnic groups. There is deep value for us all in supporting the strength of these communities and learning more about the cultures these citizens bring to Normal. It is important that we advocate for minorities the same benefits and opportunities of those groups that currently make up the majority of our population. Efforts must be made to ensure strong representation of ethnic voices in all Town-sponsored task forces, committees, commissions, and boards.

    START UP: Follow the integration of the Normal Police Substation on Orlando Avenue with dialogue with members of that neighborhood about what they need, what they fear, where they are suffering, what they think will help build quality of life in the neighborhood, and how they can help make that happen. Consider what the Town is contributing toward–including lessening—the tensions and unrest experienced in the Orlando Avenue area (for example, through police services, zoning, busing, social services) and what further measures are needed.
     
  5. Environmental Sustainability
    CONTRIBUTORS: Laurine Brown, Caroline Wade, Clark Abraham, Bob Broad, Jean Robins

    OPPORTUNITY: Protect the Town of Normal from environmental degradation, ensure the quality and quantity of our ground water supply, and build the validity of Town participation in/control of the creation and management of green policy.

    NEED: The need to reduce Town citizens’ exposure to environmental toxins; the immediate need to plan for a viable, long-term water supply; the need to protect and preserve prairie lands and their indigenous flora and fauna. The need to create a community landscape which redefines beauty in homeowner and public yards and parks to those that are ecologically “smart”: supporting native diversity, conserving natural resources (e.g. water, fossil fuels), avoiding synthetic pesticides and high-nitrogen fertilizers, and providing safe recreation for our community and all living things. “You can’t know who you are until you know where you are.”

    DESCRIPTION:
    1. Modeling after communities in Canada (Nova Scotia, Toronto, Halifax, Nova Scotia) and the US (Fairfax CA, Marin Co CA, Port Washington NY, Huntington Co NY) the Town would work through parks and recreation to shift public park and yard maintenance to incorporate sound ecological practices.
       
    2. The town would develop a strong community education program, possibly with a community “demonstration” yard that encourages and enables homeowners to incorporate such practices in their yards (networking with agencies such as Ecology Action Center (EAC), Cooperative Extension, Master Gardeners, Audubon, Living upstream, and businesses such as landscaping and home/garden shops, and more).
       
    3. Modeling after Canadian communities and legislation successfully passed in Illinois which requires public schools to implement Integrated Pest Management (IPM) practices indoors (thereby limiting children’s exposures to harmful chemicals), the town should introduce legislation to ban the use of synthetic pesticides for cosmetic (aesthetic) purposes in public and private yards, while providing a strong education and demonstration program to enable community members to successfully do this.

    START UP:
    1. Provide tax incentives for non-use of lawn pesticides. Partner with communities throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe in banning the spraying of pesticides on public green spaces and, eventually, on private properties. Provide re-education about and tools for strategies for lawn treatment. Establish a model green lot to demonstrate the effectiveness of alternative treatment strategies. Investigate possible legislation to ban aesthetic use of pesticides, and draft.
       
    2. Partner with Ecology Action Center and Living Upstream to educate people about the threats of waste to safety and health (What’s In It For Me?). Fund curb-side recycling and provide incentives for reduced trash production. Hire a “Yard Smart” coordinator to work through Parks & Rec (Ecology Action Center, cooperative extension. or other).
       
    3. Work regionally with Bloomington, McLean County, and adjoining towns to create viable regional solutions to sourcing water and water reclamation.
       
  6. Neighborhood Schools and Quality Education
    CONTRIBUTOR: Hile-Robins Advisory Group

    OPPORTUNITY: Step back from the current state and local education crises to rethink what it is we want from our schools, what we are willing and unwilling to do to get there, and how we get it done.

    NEED: The need to build community, to help families of all kinds knit together in mutual concern; the need to provide excellent, equal education to the Town’s kids; the need to develop future leaders and citizens for Normal and for the world at large; the need to nurture the strength of purpose and high morale that comes from hope for the future. “It’s not about money; it’s about priorities.”

    DESCRIPTION: Here we mean to register our concern about the provision of high-quality public education as one of the Town’s greatest challenges in the next 25 years. We see that public education is a huge, systemic challenge, and we believe that the Town of Normal needs to be engaged in understanding and working the challenges through in order to protect the Town’s children and its future. We believe that neighborhood schools contribute tangibly to the quality of life in and around schools. Quality of education is, of course, a primary concern of people who might consider moving to any community, as it is for those of us, with and without children, who live here now. When the schools suffer, the perceived quality of life is diminished, making Normal a less desirable place to live.

    START UP OPTIONS:
     
    1. Work with ISU/IWU social research units to do a review of research related to the prioritization of neighborhood schools. Several immediate sources:

      Smart Growth www.smartgrowthamerica.org/children.html
      Liveable Communities www.lgc.org/freepub/land_use/cv_liv_places_news/2001fall/
      Milwaukee Public School, neighborhood schools project (maybe connected to vouchers)
      www2.milwaukee.k12.wi.us/supt/Pages/NIS/Pressreleases/LeadersDiscuss.html
      www.mkedcd.org/news/2001/Metcalfe.html

      Based, in part, on what we learn from the literature review, create a survey which gathers data regarding the impact of neighborhood schools on quality of life within and beyond the schools. Work with the Citizen’s Advisory Councils from Unit 5 and District 87 to distribute the surveys to their constituencies and again with the universities to analyze results.
       
    2. Appoint a group of interested citizens to liaison between the Town of Normal and the Unit 5 school board and administration, ensuring regular communication about the school board’s strategic planning, particularly for new buildings, to the town planners.
       
    3. The Town of Normal collaborate with Unit 5 to plan and conduct a Future Search, an intensive, systems-based, 2½-day long dialogue across all interested stakeholders with a focus on addressing education issues. Talk with Dr. Mary Broad (301.657.8638) about her experiences facilitating such searches and her knowledge of their application in/successes on behalf of school systems. See Marvin Weisbord’s Future Search: An Action Guide to Finding Common Ground in Organizations and Communities and www.futuresearch.net for background on many future searches that have been conducted in school systems in the U.S. and elsewhere.

This page last modified 05/14/08.