Only a few days remain for people who live and work in Christian County to take a survey that will help fine-tune a community vision plan, which will serve the community for a decade.
The survey is available online. It takes less than 20 minutes to complete.
The results will help organizers complete Christian County Vision 2030.
As an incentive to get more people involved, anyone who takes the survey this week will be eligible to win a $250 Visa gift card.
In the early stages of the visioning process, a task force received input from nearly 1,300 surveys and from meetings with hundreds of people. That process resulted in 5,000 ideas, which were then distilled into 129 potential action ideas.
Now the community is being asked to vote for their favorite action ideas. The survey is divided into five areas:
- Economy, employment and infrastructure
- Housing, neighborhoods and districts
- Safety, governance, wellness and sustainability
- Livability and recreation
- Education and Workforce
Many of the action ideas deal with downtown and the city’s older neighborhoods that surround the downtown retail district.
Early responses to the vision process reveal that many people miss seeing a shared pride in the neighborhoods, said Taylor Hayes, who is coordinating the vision process for the Christian County Chamber of Commerce.
“They want to see that come back,” he said.
In addition, Hayes said, “People want more reasons to come downtown.”
Many of the ideas suggested for downtown and the older neighborhoods would require a combination of public and private investments, he said.
“The big question is how can we attract investments back into the community, and not just downtown, but for the entire community,” he said.
More information on the vision process is available here. The most recent vision plan is available here.
(Jennifer P. Brown is the editor and founder of Hoptown Chronicle. Reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org.)
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. Brown was a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era, where she worked for 30 years. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board past president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. She serves on the Hopkinsville History Foundation's board.
