Have
you ever endured an incredibly boring planning meeting at Town
Hall? Some developer, standing before a blizzard of maps and
charts, drones on about how his subdivision will fit seamlessly
into your community. You know that the size and location of the
project will forever mar the incredible view over the river to the
mountains and disrupt the migration of the local elk herd, but you
have no way to show it. Soon, the meeting devolves into a shouting
match.
Now imagine the same meeting, except this
time the maps and charts are gone. In their place is a large
screen, hooked up to a laptop computer. On the screen is a 3-D
picture of your town, with realistic mountains and buildings and
trees. As a planning commissioner plays with the mouse, the picture
moves. Suddenly, you are flying over the downtown, out to the mesa
where the proposed subdivision is to be located. With a click, the
subdivision appears, streets and all. You fly down low, to ground
level, and the new houses rise up as if you were a Star Wars pilot
threading through a streaming asteroid field. Everyone in the
audience instantly understands what the new development will look
like. Soon, the developer and citizens are talking about a
clustered development scenario that would leave much of the land
open.
Welcome to the future of planning, where
seeing is believing thanks to the wonders of technology and the
efforts of the Orton Family Foundation. Two years ago, the
foundation – which is the brainchild of Lyman Orton, founder and
president of The Vermont Country Store – unveiled its powerful new
planning software, CommunityViz. Not only does the software use GIS
mapping technology to provide accurate depictions of the landscape,
but it instantly tabulates how different development scenarios will
affect everything from traffic counts to tax
revenues.
The goal of CommunityViz is to help
planning departments, citizens and developers anticipate problems
and revise development plans early in the process, says Doug
Walker, who works for the Orton Family Foundation out of Boulder,
Colo. “It’s about finding a common language for
planning.”
So far, CommunityViz has been tested
in a few Western communities, including Santa Fe, N.M., and Lyons,
Colo. It doesn’t come cheap: The cost of the software and inputting
all the data needed to operate it can run around $10,000. But the
foundation is looking for partners (it’s already working with The
Nature Conservancy) to help make it widely available – and
affordable – throughout rural America, to encourage towns and
counties to team up.
For more information about
CommunityViz, call toll-free 866/953-1400, e-mail
info@communityviz.com or go to www.communityviz.com. For
information about other Orton Family Foundation planning tools,
including the community video and mapping projects, contact
Townsend Anderson, Western Office, at 970/879-2126 or
rockymt@orton.org.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A new planning tool takes flight.
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