Our Community, Our Plan: Letter to the Consultant, Prior to the “Launch”
Dear Reader,
As you may know, our City is undertaking a rewrite of its primary land-use document, called the Comprehensive Plan. This document will guide the full range of land-use considerations for our City, focused primarily on building and development, but also public space, preservation, the natural environment, mobility, services and amenities, and community health. The Plan’s impacts will be pervasive and far-reaching on the character and well-being of our community.
I would like to share with you an email (pasted below) that I sent to Jamie Green, Founder and Principal at Planning NEXT. He is the head consultant facilitating this rewriting process. I cc’d City Manager Stewart. The letter expresses my concerns and hopes for the current process—we must get it right—based on what transpired during, and after, the last Comprehensive Plan rewrite (2013-14). That process, as described in my letter below, was profoundly flawed and it is my hope that we avoid, from the outset, the same mistake this time.
My guiding principle is that the Plan ought to be grounded upon and express the ideas and values of Worthington’s residents. No one knows better than those who live here who we are and who we want to be as a community. The Plan ought to embrace this approach. Though that may sound like an obvious thing to most people, it is in fact not so commonly achieved in the world of consultants and city planning.
The first public meeting of the current planning process, called “The Launch,” is this coming Wednesday (6/11/25), 6:30-8:00 PM, at the Worthington Education Center, 200 East Wilson Bridge Road. I encourage you to attend and make your voice heard.
Feedback is welcome, as always, here: davidwrobinsonblog@gmail.com
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Dear Mr. Green,
I’m writing to you about the upcoming public meeting in our community, “The Launch of Worthington Together,” where I believe you will be serving as the chief facilitator for the consulting firm, Planning NEXT.
The Comprehensive Plan rewrite for which your firm has been hired is of great importance to the future of our community. I wish to avoid in your current efforts what happened, to the serious and continuing detriment of our community, the last time our City hired a consulting firm to rewrite a portion of our Comprehensive Plan.
Back in 2013-14, our City Manager at the time, Matt Greeson, hired consulting firm MKSK to rewrite the UMCH portion of the Comprehensive Plan. As a central part of that process, the public was invited to community forums so they could directly contribute. The typical Worthington resident who participated naturally assumed that their expressed views and ideas, and those of their neighbors, would actually matter in determining the substance of the final Plan.
Unfortunately, this assumption was not borne out. Following two well-attended, interactive public meetings, and significant online feedback, the City adopted a Plan that was extremely out of sync and in conflict with what the public had expressed throughout the process. This is not just my opinion. If interested, you can review one source of public responses to the proposed Plan, here: https://worthington.org/565/Interactive-Feedback. The comments are available at the links on that page.
Further, the resulting Comprehensive Plan claimed, in its own text, to be a “consensus document.” This claim, absurd to anyone tuned in to Worthington public opinion, was an affront. To me, it was morally offensive that our city would promote a falsehood in a formal and significant public document. Compounding this original transgression, the City used this claim of “consensus” in a way that sowed conflict for years.
When I became a Council Member in 2018, I began asking City Manager Greeson how and why the City could claim this “consensus” regarding the UMCH Plan when it was clearly not true. On more than one occasion, he equivocated and deflected. Eventually, however, at maybe the third one-on-one meeting where I pressed him on the matter, he said, and I paraphrase: “what we were doing was not really gathering ideas, but putting together focus groups so we could see how they responded to expert opinion.”
While I was glad that the truth of things was finally acknowledged—that the Plan was not based on public opinion and was never intended to be so—I was also dismayed and angry. The Worthington residents who came to those community planning meetings did not do so in order to be studied as part of a marketing exercise. They came to be heard and taken seriously as contributing citizens. The City’s actions amounted to a violation of the public trust. Then, by subsequently telling the public there was a “consensus,” that we supported a plan that we did not, the City engaged in a gaslighting of our community.
The consequences of all of this for our community have been far-reaching and highly negative. The UMCH property remains undeveloped. The City has had to defend itself against a hostile lawsuit filed by the current owner of the property. And, perhaps worst of all, the community has suffered as the possibility of productive and respectful public discourse about this issue has become nearly impossible.
I am not privy to the discussions that you and City Manager Stewart have had, nor do I know how you interpret your charge as our consultant, specifically as it relates to the purpose of public participation. But I do hope to avoid a repeat of what I have described above, hence this email. The public has a right to expect that the Plan resulting from your work will be based primarily upon their ideas, input, and expressed desires, and not that of any other party. There is an obligation for all involved in leading this process to be forthright with the public about the purpose and significance of their participation. It is their Comprehensive Plan just as it is their community.
So I move forward, trusting in your goodwill and professionalism, with anticipation of further dialog as the planning process unfolds.
Thank you.
David Robinson
City Council Member
Worthington, Ohio
