Chambana Sun

At its April 10 meeting, the Urbana City Council received a presentation from its senior advisor for Integrated Strategy Development, Andrea Ruedi, on Examine Urbana, a facet of the city's comprehensive plan.

“I want to emphasize how Examine Urbana is an invaluable tool for the city that will not only be used for our next round of community engagement for our new comp plan, but will also serve as a useful resource for the city, the city council and the public,” Ruedi said. “We also, (city planner) Lily (Wilcock) and I both, would also like to thank the many staff members that were involved in this whole process of examiners ... providing data, reviewing, critiquing, and yes, we do take constructive criticism well and editing the many drafts that we've had.”

Wilcock gave an overview of the project, which has culminated in a live and interactive website that provides the data and stories that make up the background of the comprehensive plan, as well as the outline and structure of their creating the comprehensive plan. 

She explained it is not a comprehensive document containing plans, details, and data on every single topic in the city organization, but a way to gather in the community and create more engagement with them and the city’s plans.

“Oftentimes with a comprehensive plan, you need to have some kind of background information for people to provide thorough and informed public input, and also make decisions that are based off of the whole community," Wilcock said. "And maybe take our knowledge or personal knowledge of Urbana and expand that to the 40,000 people who live here and all the people outside of that who also interact with Urbana on a daily basis, a weekly basis, monthly basis when we're providing and thinking about the future of Urbana.” 

Wilcock stressed the importance of public input.

 “So Examine Urbana is that: it's the background information for a comprehensive plan," she said. "It's informed by the people of Urbana, different stories that we wanted to highlight that touch on comprehensive plan issues, future vision issues, trends that we see in Urbana and also put people first.”

The board also saw a presentation from MSW candidate Brittany Tuten on an evaluation of CTSO’s Education and Employment Opportunities Program.

Council will meet again at 7 p.m. on April 24 at 400 South Vine St.