Columbia 'Safe Routes': They Walked & Rolled!

Dozens of young Columbians turned out this week for the first annual "Walk & Roll to School Day" and helped make history!

The event was part of a growing international effort to encourage more students to walk or bicycle to school. More than fifty students participated at Immaculate Conception School, and another 25 or more walked or biked for the first time to Parkview Elementary School. Mayor Kevin Hutchinson turned out to encourage the participants, and the event was captured by local media.

Participation was relatively sparse at Columbia Middle School, largely due to significant barriers to safe biking and walking to that location. This school's impediments to safer routes--as well as barriers to walking or biking to the other schools in Columbia--are assessed in a new School Travel plan approved by city and school officials in September. Partners in the local Safe Routes To School program will now begin seeking funding to make recommended improvements.

(Photo courtesy louisphotos.com)

Lace Up Your Sneakers...

...oil your bicycle chain, wear a warm coat, and join the fun!

Parkview Elementary, Columbia Middle School and Immaculate Conception School are partnering with the City of Columbia, the Monroe County YMCA and other partners to celebrate the community’s first annual Walk & Roll To School Day this Wednesday, October 28th.

Students from each school will be walking or riding bicycles along with parents, teachers and community leaders. Mayor Kevin Hutchinson and members of the Columbia City Council will also participate in the event. The event will mark the community’s recognition of International Walk to School Day, an event that includes 5,000 schools from all 50 states as well as 40 countries around the world.

Walk to School events work to create safer routes for walking and bicycling and emphasize the importance of issues such as increasing physical activity among children, pedestrian safety, traffic congestion, concern for the environment and building connections between families, schools and the broader community.

The event is being organized by the local Safe Routes To School Steering Committee, a broad-based group of partner organizations and community members that recently completed a comprehensive School Travel Plan.

Miller-Fiege Home Sold to City

The historic Miller-Fiege home--a landmark at 140 S. Main St.--was transferred yesterday into the City's ownership.

This home, built in 1852, was purchased with proceeds from the City's bond issue approved earlier this year. It contains numerous antiques from the period. Columbia's Heritage & Preservation Commission will now take on the task of organizing the building for eventual use as a museum and tourist attraction.

Community Supports Child Travel Safety

Next Wednesday morning, middle school and elementary students across Columbia will participate in a special event: Walk & Roll to School Day. This event will be sponsored by local participants in the Safe Routes To School initiative, a new community partnership between the City of Columbia, local schools, parents and students.

This is not Columbia's first effort to improve bicycle safety for its younger citizens, however. Local efforts have already launched two noteworthy efforts:

Safety Town is a child accident prevention program that introduces safety awareness and prevention procedures to children between the ages of 5 and 7. The program uses a simulated town layout, classroom facility and off campus field trip. Children learn safety procedures through their own involvement under the guidance of a police officer, fire fighters, paramedics, certified teachers and trained volunteers. Children practice and experience "real life" situations before confronted with situations on their own. In accordance with their age and maturity, children are trained to evaluate "safe from unsafe" and learn how to react safely when confronted with dangerous situations.

Joseph Cangas, M.D., a pediatrician at Illini Pediatrics in Columbia and an avid bicyclist, received the American Medical Association’s Young Physician Section Community Service Award in 2007 for his ongoing work as “the helmet doctor.” In May, 2005, he launched the Helmets First!program. Dr. Cangas gives presentations--and free bike helmets--to school and community groups on an average of once a week. He has organized bicycle rodeos in five Illinois communities, and the Waterloo, Columbia and Salem police departments are handing out rewards to kids wearing helmets. And, Dr. Cangas always is available to properly fit helmets at his office.

A Better Path to School

Parkview Elementary, Columbia Middle School and Immaculate Conception School have worked with the City of Columbia, the Monroe County YMCA and other partners to develop a School Travel Plan that identifies barriers to walking or bicycling to school.

Columbia has the vision to create a city-wide network of paths (not sidewalks) that will connect abandoned railroad right-of-way to Rueck Rd. (north-south), link Main St. to Bolm-Schuhkraft Park via Monroe St. (east-west), and tie Columbia Middle School to the old middle school site via a new ball field currently under construction. These paths will encourage bicycling and walking for all community residents and particularly for school-age children. Where these paths run along a public street, they will be separated by a strip of grass in order to provide a measure of traffic calming. These improvements are consistent with Columbia’s Bike & Greenway Plan, adopted in 2006.

City Hall = Ivory Castle?

Wendy Water's most recent post in her blog, All About Cities, ponders why city halls are so often "distinct, self-contained building[s] separated from most of the key residential, business and entertainment areas of the city."

"Perhaps city hall workers need to have a variety of locales from which they can work," she muses. "Sitting in an office overlooking a poor neighborhood filled with the homeless, mentally ill and/or drug addicted might help inspire more creativity in solving this issue. Reporting to work in a struggling business district similarly might allow city workers to better understand the needs of businesses in that area."

Are city workers isolated from the rest of their community? Is this less a problem in a smaller city like Columbia, or is it true everywhere?

Keep Playin' That Walk & Roll!

Next Wednesday morning, October 29th, middle school and elementary students across Columbia will lace up their sneakers and roll out their bikes for a special event: Walk & Roll to School Day. This event will be sponsored by local participants in the Safe Routes To School initiative, a new community partnership between the City of Columbia, local schools, parents and students.

Columbia's event is this community's first foray into an annual celebration observed in more than 42 countries to promote physical activity and taking safe routes to school. It's focus is encouraging more students to walk or ride to school, a trend that reflects increasing public interest in what has been come to be known as the "walkability" factor--more consumers are looking for places to live where they don't always have to drive and pump less gas to get to where they want to go.

Parkview Elementary, Columbia Middle School and Immaculate Conception School have agreed to encourage their students to bypass the family mini-van and roll or stroll to school next Wednesday in a combined effort to boost non-motorized attendance. Representatives from these schools and other community leaders recently adopted a School Travel Plan that identifies barriers to such travel--and suggests solutions.

More on the elements of the School Travel Plan in posts to follow this week...

More Signs May Not Mean More Visibility

With business signs, more is not necessarily better. Oversized signs and signage "clutter" can have a negative impact on how Main Street and its businesses are perceived.

"It also becomes very expensive and cost-prohibitive for...start-up business to have to pay $10,000 or $15,000 on a sign, just to get minimal recognition on the street," says Scott Day of Urban Development Services in an article in the latest edition of Downtown Promotion Reporter. Other common business signage problems are signs not properly positioned for the public to see them, and store windows that are jam-packed with signage.

"Too many signs say too many things," Day says. "It becomes visual white noise. People don't want to take the time to sort through it all. A lot of main street retail corridors suffer from information overload."

City Finances May Follow the Private Sector

Local government economic struggles mirror those of the nation, according to a quick poll conducted by ICMA (the professional and educational organization for city administrators) in September. Decreasing revenue from property tax, sales tax, and new construction permits, coupled with sluggish sales of new and older homes, and rising fuel transportation costs all have contributed to economic anxiety for local governments.

The 339 city and county managers responding to the ICMA poll indicated that they are taking action to mitigate the effect of these declining revenues by freezing vacant positions (55%), reducing service hours (39%), sharing services with another local government (36%), and eliminating delivery of non-required services (34%). Many cities are exploring new ways--from permitting city employees to use golf carts on city streets to implementing four-day work weeks--to lower costs, as well.

Nearly 70% of local governments have increased or added user fees for services, and close to 40% are rescinding previously approved capital expenditures. Thirty-five percent of local governments have increased the rates of those taxes that have showed a decline in revenue--such as sales, property, and utility taxes. More local governments (59%) have raised property tax to offset revenue decreases elsewhere.

The weak housing market has so severely affected property tax revenues that unlike the 2001 economic downturn, those revenues cannot buffer the effects in declining income and sales tax receipts and will most likely have an impact on city budgets until 2010, the ICMA's experts project.

Thus far, the City of Columbia has not had to explore any of these options, but the continuing economic downturn is likely to hit home here eventually.

Meeting: New Sign Code Hangs in the Balance

Recent discussion in the City Council's Ordinance, Planning & Zoning Committee about grants for façade renovations has centered on the need to build a more consistent look, enhance buildings’ historic character, and still support business traffic on Main Street. The catalyst for this discussion has been the provision within the Main St. Façade Program that grants (up to $3000) can be used for signage--and the fact that the types of signage eligible for awards are not defined.

Tonight, the City Council is considering the following actions:

1. For now, withdraw grant eligibility for signage through the Main St. Façade Program except for where the signage is part of an awning;
2. Develop a new sign graphics ordinance strictly for Main St. with assistance from the Civic Progress Committee and the Heritage & Preservation Commission—in the meantime, strict adherence should be maintained to the existing sign ordinance regarding physical characteristics (e.g., height, width, mounting technique);
3. Where the new ordinance requires different types of signage at an additional cost, make the new expense eligible for grants through the Main St. Façade Program.

How would this work? The City could set aside $3000 from the current grant allocation to fund ten (10) grants of $300 each for signage.

Why City Planners Blog

"Blogs are emerging as important information sources in the contemporary discourse on cities and city planning," observes Michael Dudley, Research Associate and Librarian for the Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Winnipeg in a recent post on Planetizen.

Dudley cites several ways in which blogs can help professional planners develop better processes and products, including:

1. Allowing planners to contribute to community debate in a very timely way;
2. Initiating dialogue--postings are always subject to commentary and refutation;
3. Helping planners to keep track of, understand and--more importantly--mentally integrate perspectives from multiple sources to combine them with their own thoughts and observations.

As a form of communication with colleagues and the public, an attractive environment for citizen engagement, a way to track trends and issues, and as a resource for the planning educator--"the blog can become an important and exciting part of the planner’s professional toolkit."

It is becoming relatively common for cities to use blogs for general communication, venues that Oak Harbor planner Rob Voight describes as "a kind of voice mail on growth hormone." By developing project-specific blogs for the issues related to subdivision regulations (as in his site, http://www.cohsubdivisions.blogspot.com/), Voight has pioneered use of these online tools in ways that are innovative for municipalities.

Voight contends that blogging "is not only a tool but an entirely new platform for community engagement."

City Recognized for Outstanding Accident Prevention

The City of Columbia has received an Illinois Municipal League Risk Management Association (IMLRMA) Loss Prevention Safety Award to recognize an outstanding accident prevention record.

The Loss Prevention Safety Award recognizes exemplary commitment to safety on the part of both employees and management of the City of Columbia. “Our City administrator worked closely with his department heads to foster awareness of potential exposure,” observed Mayor Kevin Hutchinson, “and the results are reflected in this recognition.”

Since 1981, the IMLRMA has catered to the risk management needs of cities and villages across Illinois. The leading provider of comprehensive property/casualty coverage in the state, the IMLRMA currently serves 786 member municipalities.

Americans: Entrepreneurs the Answer to Economic Woes

Americans see entrepreneurship as the answer to the current financial crisis, a new survey from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation finds. Still, a majority hesitates to become entrepreneurs themselves because of worries about the economy.

Conducted last weekend, the phone survey found that more than 70 percent of voters believe the health of the economy depends on the success of entrepreneurs, while 80 percent want to see the government use its resources to actively encourage entrepreneurship. "Americans in big numbers are looking to entrepreneurs to rally the economy," observed Kauffman Foundation President and CEO Carl Schramm after reviewing the survey results.

Although Americans appear to be confident in entrepreneurs' abilities, they are reluctant to start their own companies, with 71 percent of survey respondents saying the economic crisis has made it more difficult to become an entrepreneur. Despite findings that 49 percent of respondents see opportunities for entrepreneurial undertakings in the current economy, only 26 percent would actually consider starting a business in the next five years.

The survey also found that 26 percent believe the impact of the financial crisis will be "very bad" or "devastating" for them, while 34 percent said it will be "pretty bad" for them personally. 64 percent think that Main Street will suffer the most severe consequences from the situation, with only 16 percent saying Wall Street will be hardest hit.

By a two-to-one margin, Americans are looking to business leaders rather than the government to lead the way out of the economic mess. "History has repeatedly demonstrated that new companies and entrepreneurship are the way to bolster a flagging economy," said Schramm. "The American people understand this."

Will the Economic Crisis Limit City Resources?

A front-page article in yesterday's edition of The New York Times reported that many local governments have been effectively shut out of the bond markets for the past two weeks, raising the cost of day-to-day operations, threatening longer-term projects and dampening a major source of jobs and stability.

Analysts said the dysfunction in the municipal bond markets "appeared to signal the end of an era of relatively cheap money for governments and, probably, the start of an era of tough choices for communities." When the market starts moving again, they observed, it will look a lot like the municipal bond market of 10 years ago, before the arrival of financial wizardry in the form of structured-finance products, which lowered borrowing costs but added big new risks. Instead, governments will probably be issuing bonds with fixed, higher rates of interest.

Meantime, cities will be doing lots of belt-tightening--forcing them to lower the level of service they provide, cut payrolls, or raise taxes and fees.