The County held two virtual visioning workshops through GoToWebinar on August 19th and 20th which focused on one of two downtown districts, White Rock and Los Alamos, respectively. These visioning workshop were intended to help the community articulate a vision for the downtown areas and prioritize downtown goals. These events were well attended; the White Rock session had approximately 80 participants and the Los Alamos session had approximately 100 participants.

The workshops began with the project team providing an introduction of the Downtown Master Plans & Code Update project, followed by a brief presentation on successful downtown strategies that covered downtown planning trends and takeaways from several successful downtown precedents. The workshops then engaged participants in a general discussion on what makes the downtown areas of either White Rock or Las Alamos successful. Comments were recorded through an online collaborative ‘white board’ platform. Throughout the workshop webinar, participants could ask questions, leave comments and share their thoughts through a question feed. Questions and comments were discussed as appropriate. The comments and questions are recorded and provide additional feedback.

After the general discussion, the project team asked participants to utilize a virtual survey platform to solicit feedback instantly. Participants were asked a series of downtown-specific questions related to seven different topic areas: visual identity, housing, economic vitality, transportation, public space/street design, infrastructure and sustainability. Each topic area was followed by a review of existing Comprehensive Plan goals before participants ranked the goals according to importance. An open-ended question then collected ideas and thoughts on goals not considered.

Lastly, participants were asked to generate a vision statements for the downtowns.

The survey will be available to take until September 4th.  The results will be evaluated, and the project team will generate preliminary goals and a preliminary vision statement from the information gathered. These will be available for review on the website when completed. The goals and vision statement will serve as a basis for the design workshops, scheduled for September 21st and 28th.