Grant funds to enliven Springs area

As the county gets ready to present its preliminary plan for how to spend nearly a half-million dollars in grant funds on development projects in the Springs area, a new buzz word has been introduced to the discussion. It’s two words put together, actually: “place” and “making.”

“Placemaking is not just about creating an end product,” says 1st District Supervisor Susan Gorin, the Valley representative who was actively involved in securing the above-mentioned $450,000 grant from the Sonoma County Transportation Authority. The grant stipulates the money must be used to develop an “area plan” for the Springs community, a plan intended to guide and shape the unincorporated area into a more vibrant and sustainable pedestrian-oriented community.

“It’s going to be a journey,” says Gorin, who adds that “placemaking,” an increasingly popular process of creating usable community spaces through public input and a series of key planning principles, is one of many tools that will be looked at and employed as the Springs puts the grant money to its best possible use. At a meeting last month of the Springs Community Alliance, Ruthie Snyder, once the mayor of Mill Valley, made a presentation on the power of placemaking as a practice and a philosophy.

“It’s the process of a community coming together to identify points of interest, places where they might think about stopping by,” says Gorin. “It can be as simple as saying, ‘Where might I like to bring a cup of coffee in the morning and sit and see what happens?’ Or, ‘Where might be a good place for the elders of the community to sit and swap stories?’ Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have bocce ball courts or something like that? But it’s all about taking baby steps through this process.”

To participate in the process, a community action team is being formed from a group of Springs area volunteers. The group will review the area plan – which is being previewed at this Thursday’s Springs Community Alliance meeting at the Sonoma Charter School - and will offer its own ideas and suggestions.

This is one of just many ways the community will be invited to participate in its own future, says Gorin.

“There needs to be forward movement on part of the community to help figure out how to make a way forward,” she says. “The planning grant is for communities that have been designated as priority development areas.”

If the fullplace making process is employed, then the adoption of a tool called “place audits” will come into play.

“Place audits,” Snyder told the Index-Tribune in a recent interview, “are where different groups that will be in some way connected to a particular space are invited to come down, whether it’s a used park or a courtyard area or a sidewalk, and take a look at what that space has, what it lacks, and what uses it might have.”

The Springs, of course, is not a single community, but several, each with its own unique character.

“The identity of the various communities within the Springs are defined, to a degree, by the fact that they are all aligned along the Highway 12 corridor,” Gorin points out. “There is a significant tension because of that, because there is a state highway running through the middle of the area. Now, Caltrans likes to point out that the function of a state highway is to get vehicles from place to place as rapidly as possible. But we have communities straddling both sides of that highway, yearning to engage with each other and develop into strong, thriving communities.”

That, she says, is where placemaking comes in.

“Placemaking is one tool the communities can use to create warm stopping places and gathering places, locations for public art, locations for visual interest,” she says, “and to let the drivers who are traveling along the state highway understand that there is a vibrancy to the communities they are passing through. And to let those drivers know that it’s worth their time to stop there, to get some lunch or explore the shops, that it’s worth thinking about the history of the place, and where it might be going in the future.”

The grant money, as well, gives the process an additional jolt of energy, since it’s one thing to imagine improvements for an area, and quite another to pay for them.

“The county has limited resources,” Gorin admits, “so I’m very excited that, with this money, we’re going to be able to do all kinds of positive things. We can start looking for replacement parking, to make up for some of what’s been lost along the corridor due to street widening. We’re going to be looking for places to do tree planting, and to install planter boxes. This plan will connect and articulate all of those efforts, and I think placemaking, as a tool – if the community is on board with it – will likely be a valuable part of how we move forward.”

As Snyder also points out, another major piece of placemaking is that, once an area is identified, once the place audits are done and the various improvements are made and people are gathering there, it is vital to have a way to “manage” those spaces.

“Management means there is someone who is responsible for making things happen there,” Snyder says. “Someone who organizes events, activities, art shows, performances, all kinds of things that keep the place alive and vibrant.”

According to Gorin, it will take a while to get to that point, but the process is as significant as the final result.

“It’s through that process that the community can build identity and ownership of its spaces,” she says. “It’s not just the government coming in and doing it for the community. It’s the people having a primary voice in how to develop those spaces for the community.”

Email David at david.templeton@sonomanews.com.