Community Plan - 2/24/08

The following email was sent out to members of the Illahee Community Plan Citizens Advisory Group (CAG) and is provided for your information:

This is a reminder of tomorrow's "2008 Illahee Community Plan Update Open House & Community Planning Process Kick-Off" meeting on Monday, February 25th, at the Kitsap Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Church on Perry Ave from 6-8 pm.

Kitsap County is taking over the public process of updating the Illahee Community Plan. The county will be working with the Illahee Community and will likely establish a new Citizens Advisory Group. We would like to encourage as many of you as possible to stay involved and see it to its completion, which we hope will be early in 2008.

It has been a long wait since the initial draft was finished on 7/5/06. We've completed two more drafts and feel the Plan has gotten much better. We modeled our Plan after the Manchester Plan, which was updated in 2007, and so we hope to learn some lessons from them. We are fortunate to have as our planner the person who did the Manchester Plan Update, Katrina Knutson.

Whether you decide to continue or not, it has been great working with you. We regret we can't acknowledge everyone as we don't have records of all who worked on all the different sections or chapters or those who made all the different suggestions or edits. We also had others help who did not want to be a member of the CAG and we aren't able to thank most of them because they aren't on the CAG list.

Let us leave you with some statistics. When we wondered if the community was interested in developing a community plan we distributed approximately 1000 questionnaires and we were amazed that nearly 250 people sent in a response, with 234 saying they wanted to develop a Plan. Moreover, many volunteered to be on the CAG, which eventually numbered over 100.

We need to admit that we were not able to keep our communications with such a big group. We tried to put out update letters to those who didn't have email, and eventually ran out of time and energy. We then decided to communicate only to those with email. We also did not call to keep track of all the emails when people changed providers. We felt we did good until mid 2006 and when things dragged on we didn't keep up. We now send out community updates (blind copies) to over 250 email addresses and now have 23 that come back undeliverable.

Thank you for all your efforts and for a great beginning draft of the Illahee Community Plan! We hope you can help with this final effort and we will see you Monday!

Dennis Sheeran & Jim Aho