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Monona residents share input as part of visioning program process

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Dozens of Monona residents of all ages (including kids) shared their thoughts about the community Feb. 13, during the first input session organized as part of Monona’s participation in the Iowa’s Living Roadways 2016 Community Visioning Program. (Submitted photo)

By Audrey Posten, North Iowa Times Editor

Dozens of Monona residents of all ages shared their thoughts about the community Feb. 13, during the first input session organized as part of Monona’s participation in the Iowa’s Living Roadways 2016 Community Visioning Program.

Monona is one of 10 communities participating in the program, which is sponsored by the Iowa Department of Transportation in partnership with Iowa State University Landscape Architecture and Extension and the non-profit Trees Forever. The program integrates technical landscape planning and design techniques with sustainable community action to assist community leaders and volunteers in making sound and meaningful decisions about the local landscape.

Through this first input session, participants, who were split into several focus groups (senior citizens/mobility-challenged, parents and children, active adult recreational users and steering committee), traveled around the community taking photos of aspects they thought were either assets or barriers for Monona.

The Iowa State team uploaded all the photos onto an online map, which is accessible on the website communityvisioning.org. Each photo is annotated with either a green point (asset) or red point (barrier), along with any comments participants had about the location.

“What’s neat about this is you can see what other people in the community are thinking,” shared Sandra Oberbroeckling, with Iowa State University. “We’re collecting opinions from a good cross-section of the community, so you can see where opinions differ and where they’re concentrated. You can see patterns start to emerge.”

Participant responses can also be filtered by focus group, age and gender to see the opinions of different cross-sections.

Some of the aspects participants commonly listed as assets to Monona included the butterfly garden and trail, aquatic center and city park playground equipment. The most-noted barriers were downtown lighting, the city park restrooms and a need for improvements at Gateway Park.

Emily Swihart, with Trees Forever, said this was the first of a few input sessions. In April, a goal-setting meeting will be held, to determine the projects on which the design team will focus. The designs will be unveiled on June 18, at Hay Days.

To access the information collected at the input session, go to communityvisioning.org. Although the homepage still lists the 2015 communities, click on the first “here” on the page, under transportation assets and barriers maps. A new window will come up, on which you will select Monona as the community and focus group as the workshop. Click “reload,” and the data will come up on the page.

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