Modernizing Planning Departments In Weeks Not Years - Q&A with Bella Vaz, Communications Specialist, City of Grand Junction
The City of Grand of Junction is setting standards for adopting new practices within local government. People Speak is proud to have partnered with the city as they modernized their public hearings years ago and more recently evolved their community engagement projects. We had a chance to chat with Bella to learn more about how their city is able to drive rapid innovation.
People Speak: We’ve worked with cities and counties around the country but none are remotely close to as nimble as Grand Junction. Your planning department got GJSpeaks.org up and running and conducted a full quasi-judicial hearing with 7 items within just over 2 weeks of first inquiring about it. Since then it’s been full speed ahead. Can you share a bit about your motivation and ability to move so fast to adopt new technology?
Bella Vaz: It was a pleasure to work with the People Speak team to ensure that our community members could participate in Planning Commission public hearings when Covid interrupted our ability to host in-person hearings. We were lucky enough to have been researching the People Speak platform already, so we were able to implement it quickly and have our Planning Commission trained on the platform by early April of 2020. The Planning Commission also adopted a resolution for an emergency policy regarding virtual participation at this time. To get the word out to our community, we advertised the ability to provide comments at GJSpeaks on the public notice cards as well as the meeting agendas.
People Speak: That’s insightful and I remember those days, frantic and unsettled. I know many cities were under duress to find solutions for remote participation. Your fast adoption proved how fast a city can move when needed! Why do you think you have stayed with these asynchronous digital public hearings for so long, versus considering just using a webinar tool? What do you think the future holds in these regards?
Bella Vaz: We operated for a while in a virtual-only environment, streaming the live-meetings and publishing webinar links, but the platform showed us that our community was benefiting from having the ability to participate in a way that was convenient for them. We have found that our community appreciates this asynchronous and virtual participation method. So, even when we returned to in-person hearings, we continued to offer the ability to review and comment on hearing items through GJSpeaks. We also offer webinar participation still, but that only gets the interested community member so far. The ability to review information and comment on an item a week in advance is a huge selling point for us. As for the future, we won’t be moving away from online participation, in fact we are looking to expand the use of GJSpeaks in our organization.
People Speak: Thanks for sharing that. This is definitely how I wish my city served me! Let’s transition and talk about projects. Grand Junction recently started publishing projects on GJSpeaks.org. These projects are not part of any public hearing and are of interest to the whole community. Grand Junction received quite high engagement on these projects – almost immediately! What do you think helped drive community engagement on such a newly launched concept?
Bella Vaz: The projects feature is incredibly useful to our community and to our organization. My team and I had the desire to collect online comments in a way that was palatable to our decision makers and found that GJSpeaks offered that functionality with a comment policy and ability to collect written comments that we could include in agenda packets. Whenever we have a master plan or a project that we are soliciting input from the community on, we strategically include GJSpeaks as part of our public engagement plan. We include information on how to comment at GJSpeaks in our press releases, on our social media channels, as well as encourage our staff and decision makers to point interested constituents to the site.
People Speak: You were also an advisor in helping us design how projects work on the site, and were one of the first testers. Grand Junction seems to have a digital-first, roll-up-your-sleeves and innovation mindset, which is rare in local government. Any advice for others who want to try to follow your footsteps and adopt digital technology quickly, whether to modernize their public hearings and community engagement or otherwise?
Bella Vaz: I am lucky to have a progressive support system in my city leadership. To this end, our organization prioritizes meaningful participation and desires the ability to provide a range of opportunities for community members to provide feedback. By having this foundation built into our organizational ethos, we can justify the ability to innovate and expand our options for community participation. To the extent that digital opportunities for engagement are possible, the willingness to test, evaluate, adjust and test again has proven incredibly important.
People Speak: Great chatting. Thank you so much.