Community Visioning created a 4-Phase Strategic Vision for Lily Lake and its Surroundings
A citizen-prompted "visioning" process began early in 2020 to form a vision for the future use of Lily Lake and surrounding land, and to work with stakeholders to develop, adopt, and implement that vision. We solicited survey input from residents through the summer, and began face-to-face visioning in the fall.
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This culminated in a presentation to a City Council Workshop in May 2022, where they accepted our vision.
Visioning Process
With the 'blessing and participation' of the City Council on 2nd February 2021, the Friends of Lily Lake Board initiated a 'community visioning process' for the future of Lily Lake and surrounding neighborhoods, as follows:
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the Board worked with interested parties (including the City) to create a set of shared draft Guiding Principles which describe what is important to everyone;
the Board invited people to submit Proposals that met the shared Guiding Principles;
the Board and stakeholders selected one or more of the Proposals that met the most shared Principles to recommend to the City and surrounding landowners; and
the City and surrounding landowners made the final decisions about when and how they would implement the shared vision as expressed in the recommended Proposal(s).
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The Board did not make proposals or invite strategies for improving the park and its surrounding land until after the stakeholders agreed on what is important to them (i.e., the shared Guiding Principles). Rather, the Board hosted a community visioning process and to invite dissent as a way of discovering what wss important to everyone. The Board believed that if dissent was encouraged during the visioning process, those who implement plans later will avoid disagreements and costly delays and will enjoy widespread community support.
