 Hi, I'm John Fellowes, Planning Administrator with the City of Columbia, South Carolina. And I'm Shane Shaughnessy. I'm an Associate Planner with the City. Today we're going to talk to you about Columbia Compass and Vision 2036, our update to the Comprehensive Plan for the City of Columbia. Hopefully you've heard all about Columbia Compass already, but here's a quick review. A Comprehensive Plan identifies a long-range vision for a community, and in doing so helps determine policy, program, and infrastructure goals for the local government to tackle in the coming years. In South Carolina, we are required to update our plans at least every 10 years through a formal process, and we're calling this 10-year update, Columbia Compass, in Vision 2036, as we prepare for our 250th anniversary as a city. Our Comprehensive Plan will be made up of nine elements, population, natural resources, land use, transportation, housing, community facilities, cultural resources, economic development, and priority investment. Today we'd like to talk to you about what we learned so far in the planning process, as well as that last element, priority investment. During the past six or so months, we've covered steps one, two, and three. We are ready for step four. We've developed recommendations based on what we've heard from all of you and what we've found in our research, and we'd like your feedback on those during our February 12th and 13th open houses. We hope you can join us on one of those two evenings. The meetings are a drop-in format, and you'll have the opportunity to review all of our recommendations, or you can just visit the stations for the topics you're most interested in. Whether you have been engaged in the planning process, or Columbia Compass is new to you, we hope you take the chance to learn about our recommendations for the city, and let us know what you think of them. We estimate that we've engaged with over 3,400 citizens during the first phase of the planning process. Through open houses, neighborhood meetings, and our online survey, we've identified some themes that helped guide us as we developed our recommendations. In our online survey, we've asked folks to tell us what they wanted Columbia to be. Words including safe, vibrant, friendly, thriving, and diverse were commonly used when answering this question. We learned that as a community, we overwhelmingly value our neighborhoods, our cultural offerings, opportunities to engage with others, the understanding of our historic and cultural assets, and safe and walkable spaces. We've also heard a bit about your perceptions of the city, that we don't always prioritize or complete the things that we start, that we tend to be disconnected, whether it's that we don't collaborate well, or that we're separated from one another by physical barriers such as our main corridors. Folks noted that we have some pretty amazing opportunities that make us unique and special, like the river and the presence of Fort Jackson, but we could do more to leverage those resources. We also heard a lot about infrastructure needs, not just about maintenance issues, but also about the hope that we can modernize and innovate as a city. If you took this first survey, you also had a chance to identify places on a map that you felt were strong, weak, or provide an opportunity of some sort. With almost 1200 survey responses, we started to see a few trends, and we hope you take the time to visit our website and explore interactive maps of those responses. John, we've learned a lot about our first round of engagement, more than we could ever summarize in this brief video, so what stood out to you? For me, it was the people's strong emphasis, a desire for walkability, and for other transportation options. Something that interested me was that the number of folks indicated that we struggled to find information, whether it was something about city events, resources, or something else. We hope during this planning process, we're learning a little more about how best to reach out to you about the city's planning efforts, and that will help us with this and future efforts. Should we take a moment to talk about priority investment? Certainly! The priority investment element is all about how we can move forward with bringing our shared vision for the city to life, or making recommendations for implementation strategies for each of the elements. These will be summarized in the priority investment section. Think of it as the city's 10-year to-do list. That's a great analogy. During this phase of the planning process, we're asking for citizens' feedback on those implementation strategies. Citizens can provide that feedback at our open house through taking our Citizen Interactive Survey at www.columbiacompus.org or by reaching out to us by visiting our Facebook and Twitter accounts. And remember, your input now is critical. We're soon will be drafting the plan document, and we want to make sure that we've not only heard from you, but that we've understood the feedback you've provided. We hope you've signed up for our email list to stay in the loop, and you're following us on Facebook and Twitter. If you haven't, please visit us at www.columbiacompus.org and at www.colacompus. And don't forget to join us at our open houses February 12th and 13th if you can. If you can't, we'll be posting the materials from each station online after the open houses. Thank you for watching and for caring about Columbia's future.