The First Comp Plan Workshop is Complete!

It is BOCC Tuesday. This is the last meeting before the new year. A few things on the agenda of interest:

• Animal Shelter Grant
• Library Display Policy
• $16.4 million grant fron DeSantis (announced a couple of weeks ago) for sewer system updates in Crystal River
• Trust for Public Lands support letter to kickstart the survey process for sales tax (no cost to tax payers)
• Medical Marijuana Dispensary Ban

Should be a pretty "light" day, although the library display policy and dispensary ban may get a bit of discussion.

Today I want to spend time talking about the first public workshop for the Comprehensive Plan Update that took place last night. As I have said before, this is your opportunity to get involved. There will be two other workshops open to the public. Each one will be different than the last, so try to make it to the last two if you can.

Here is the website if you wish to follow along.

Here is a picture from the start of the meeting

As you can see, a good size group, particularly with only a week or so notice. That is a good thing. The online survey has hit close to 220 people so far within the week or so that it has launched. People are getting involved and we need more.

I was encouraged to see 3 commissioners in attendance: Rebecca Bays, Diana Finegan and Jeff Kinnard

Now, let's get to the meeting itself. As I have said from the beginning, my goal is to show everyone the process in how this will play out. The group will update the website with everything that I am about to show you. So if it is hard to read the boards, the information will be available online.

I am just trying to help with the transparency of the process. Many people think the data will be manipulated to get a set result. I will share information from the meetings and you can compare that to the data that is released online. I am confident it will be the same... but you will have both to verify.

That said, what happened?

The meeting kicked off with the introduction to the Inspire group and talk about the comp plan. I will spare those details as it was really just an introduction type thing.

I will share these slides. These show some information about Citrus County that the group has collected.

This next slide shows the process that we went through last night.

Basically, we took a survey live, we got to talk about things we wanted to see, got to write what we love about Citrus, got to talk about how we want to fund things and the community wall is on the website.

First, the digital survey. This is different than the one on the website. We took this live and the results were shown as we were taking it. Pretty cool.

Here are the questions and answers that we provided.

As you can see, affordable housing is by far the way that this group wanted to address additional housing needs. I think everyone agrees we need more of that here.

This shows the answers that were given. The larger the text, the more people said that word. A LOT of different words came to mind, but changing, friendly and beautiful probably do a good job describing Citrus County for the most part.

This one asked use to rank 5 things in order from most important to us to least important to us. Interestingly, infrastructure and utility improvements came out #1, although I think some people assumed it meant roads, as I heard that mentioned.

And of those things, parks and recreation was last... hmmm. It will be interesting to see what the North Florida Land Trust then shows when they do their greenprinting study.

This one shows which environment issue the County should focus on. No surprise, water resources is #1 followed by preserving and restoring natural habitats. Not sure you will find many who disagree with that.

From there, we went into the Community Assessment phase. This involved writing boards with various topics on them. Each person could walk around to the different boards and tell the staff member what they thought of that board. It was then written down.

Again, these will be available online within a week or two I am told, but want to show the full process to you all.

Each board had two questions:
1) What do you like about Citrus County's current (board topic)?
2) What would you like to change about Citrus County's (board topic)?

People would then tell the staff member the answer to those two questions and they would be written on the board.

The titles of each board are as follows (no particular order):

• Recreation and Open Space
• Roads
• Utilities
• Conservation and Preservation
• Economic Development
• Growth and Development

I am posting the boards here for you to review. Again, these will be available online, but you can see what people said last night.

Then there were two other boards.
1) How do we fund these improvements?
2) Community Idea Wall

Then one last thing on the wall. A place people could people could answer what they loved about Citrus County.

Now, it is almost as if you were part of the process.

Now, a few observations. This was a good mix of people. I would not say that this was a pro-development group nor would I say it was anti-growth group. If you read through many of the comments, there is a mix of both. That is a good thing. One of the fears going into this was getting one side or the other at all the meetings and providing only that input.

There has not been a lot of talk about funding things in this county. This goes back to the education element we discussed at the stake holder meetings. But we need to have the conversation.. How are we going to fund the things we want/need? As we know, roads will cost almost hundreds of millions to revamp. We need to discuss what they looks like going forward. Yes, looking at the budget is part of that process, but the discussion has to be more than that.

On that note, very few comments about positive things about our economic development. Lots of things people would like to see changed. The BOCC should take notice of this because we do not need a comp plan to tell us that we are struggling with economic development here.

What is the plan for that in this county? Perhaps it is time for an economic development workshop and putting together a business plan of sorts to get us to where we want to go. Or if you rather... a strategic plan. Point is... time for that conversation beyond the Comp Plan update.

Lots of concern about preservation in this county, rightfully so.

Not much to say about utilities. I think this is one we all know we need, but rarely pay attention to, until it is time for stormwater fees to increase.

Roads are obviously a popular topic. We see a lot of the same things we hear at the BOCC meetings. Address the road infrastructure. It is desperately needed.

A lot of conversation about our parks and recreation. Not surprising there either as we have quite a few options, but some concern about losing some of it.

Someone REALLY likes the Island at Piegon Forge in Tennessee. It showed up a few times on different boards. I have never heard of it but just looked it up. It is a place sort of like downtown Disney. Some amusement activities, dining, shopping and hotels.

According to their website: Eat. Shop. Play. Stay.

Not sure that will fly here, but interesting idea.

Related to that, I saw outdoor music venue pop up a few times. Remember, Holly Davis tried to get the board to agree to make an offer on Rock Crusher Canyon while it was listed for sale back in 2022 I believe. That could have provided that type of venue (that was her vision). James Dicks bought it and plans on building 953 homes on it. Can't win them all I suppose, but man, that could have been a cool feature for Citrus County.

Final thought. One thing that kept popping up over and over on the boards... community. In Citrus County people feel that they are part of a community. They know people when they go places. People help other people. We see that all the time with the various fundraisers and whatnot.

We have a sense of community that is common with smaller cities/counties. The fear is that as we grow, we will lose that small town charm. Hopefully there is a way to balance all that so we do not lose one of the very important things people love about this place.