$50K Allocated By County Commissioners To Foundation For Comprehensive Planning
$50K Allocated By County Commissioners To Foundation For Comprehensive Planning
Posted
David Slone-dslone@timesuniononline.com
$50K Allocated By County Commissioners To Foundation For Comprehensive PlanningKosciusko County commissioners agreed Tuesday morning to allocate $50,000 from Economic Development Income Tax funds to help fund comprehensive planning throughout the county. The commissioners also will send a letter to the county council in support of the allocation. Kosciusko County Community Foundation (KCCF) CEO Suzie Light, along with Associate Director Stephanie Overbey, presented the request for the allocation to the commissioners. Since 1992, the KCCF has participated successfully in Lilly Endowment’s Giving Indiana Funds for Tomorrow (GIFT) grant programs, Light said. In the past, GIFT was primarily focused on building community unrestricted endowment – the endowment funds that KCCF uses for broad grant making throughout the county. “We are now deep in the process of working our way through GIFT VII. We successfully raised half a million dollars that was matched by Lilly Endowment for our community endowment funds,” Light said. There are other parts of GIFT VII that make this initiative unique, she said. “We were awarded a grant to explore what our community citizens see as strengths, opportunities and challenges. We had been hearing over time that there is a housing shortage. We had been hearing there is a need to address workforce development. We knew that childcare and early education have been on the minds of many folks in Kosciusko County.” Three years ago, before GIFT VII, she said the KCCF Board of Directors identified workforce development and childcare/early education as funding priorities. “A portion of our work of GIFT VII has focused on those issues, including the housing strategy that you have supported. Thank you for doing that. The results of that strategy will be presented in April,” Light told the commissioners. Last summer, the Foundation hosted 11 Home Town Chats to ask people what they had to say. Visited to hear what people had to say were Mentone, Silver Lake, Claypool, Pierceton, Warsaw, Winona Lake, Leesburg, Milford, North Webster and Syracuse. They listened to the Young Adult Professionals, and asked the same questions at all of the Home Town Chats: What do you love about your community? What is missing? What do you think about workforce development, childcare, housing, planning and, if you had a magic wand, what would you wish for? “These topics resonated with those attending the Chats, but we found something that surprised us – our citizens are hungry for planning – community planning that involves more than where do roads go, more than infrastructure ... they wanted planning to address playgrounds, trails, parks, libraries, storm shelters and community amenities,” Light said. “Because we have an opportunity to take what we learned and apply for a Lilly Endowment Implementation Grant of $150,000, the Foundation Board of Directors have approved making our request focused on community comprehensive planning. We wish to invite communities throughout our county to be part of a comprehensive planning process, in a unified approach. We wish Kosciusko County to participate as the county’s current plan is 24 years old,” she continued. She said planning is important because it permits communities to plan for their growth and prioritize projects. It helps communities be eligible for state and federal funding for their projects. State statue dictates what qualifies as comprehensive planning. “We have done research to explore the cost and we understand that if each community and the county participated in individual comprehensive planning, the price tag would be about $450,000, and that individual comprehensive planning would result in siloed plans that are not informed by what their neighbors or the county is planning,” Light said. The Foundation proposed planning that would cost $264,000. The funding could come from three sources: $164,000 from the KCCF through the Lilly Endowment grant opportunity that it has and some of the KCCF’s other funding sources; $50,000 from the county; and $50,000 from a private foundation where “our application is pending and is contingent upon the county being a contributor,” she said. The towns that will participate are being asked to commit personnel for the 18-month process and to host convening of their own community members as required by state statute. “Individual communities are not being asked to contribute money in this process,”?Light said. “The goal of this project is comprehensive planning in a unified manner that creates unique individual plans for each participating community and the county with a shared vision and common threads in a comprehensive manner.” She requested a letter of support from the commissioners and that the commissioners would support the request to the Kosciusko County Council for an allocation of $50,000 to fund comprehensive planning throughout Kosciusko County. Commissioner Cary Groninger thanked Light and the KCCF staff for working on this. “I know that you guys put a ton of time in this. All these Home Town Chats. I’ve been to a few of them ... I think what you put together is really cool,” Groninger said. He said a comprehensive plan for the county was something that needed to be taken care of, and getting all the communities in the county in on it is great. “I think this is a win all the way around for everybody,” Groninger said. Commissioner Bob Conley asked if the communities of Warsaw, Winona Lake and Syracuse would be included in the process. Light said Warsaw, Wawasee and Syracuse already have comprehensive plans in place, but they will be part of the steering committee guiding the process. Groninger said he talked to County Administrator Marsha McSherry and she told him there was money in the EDIT fund to allocate the $50,000. County Auditor Michelle Puckett confirmed that. Groninger said he’d love for the county council to hear Light’s presentation, but he also made a motion to approve the $50,000, which was passed unanimously.
