Downtown Grand Rapids Inc. Planning Manager Tim Kelly emails a weekly GR Forward update to the project Steering Committee. Here's this week's communication:

Happy Monday Everyone:

Hope you all enjoyed your weekend.

Last week was a whirlwind of GR Forward related activities, which is why your email is coming out on Monday morning.

On Tuesday we met with the Grand Rapids Area Black Businesses and hosted an event with the 3rd Ward Commissioners. Wednesday we presented to the City of Grand Rapids’ Design Team and met with Endless Opportunities as well as the NAACP. Thursday we provided an update to the City Planning Commission, presented to the Grand Rapids Association of Realtors, and participated in an event with the Convention and Arena Authority’s Community Inclusion Group. A big thank you to everyone who participated in and helped to organize the meetings / events last week.

It was important to fit in all of those meetings because as of Friday at 5p, the 73-day public comment period for GR Forward ended. In that span of time we were able to hold over 50 GR Forward related events, and received more than 600 comments. All of the comments are being compiled into a spreadsheet that will include a response and identification of any action taken to amend the document. While not every comment will result in a change to the draft plan, some will, and we want to make it easy for everyone to see where those changes occurred.

Speaking of the draft plan, we will be reviewing all of the input provided during the comment period this week, and will make all necessary edits to produce a final draft plan by this Friday, October 30. As soon as that is available I will be sure to send it out to you all for review.

Web Numbers

The latest web and social media numbers are below. Be sure to continue to share the links in your network so everyone can stay up to date with our GR Forward activities.

Resources

Love this article looking at how government is using A/B testing, which are experiments to do hypothesis testing on two separate variables, to ‘nudge’ people, processes, and programs to be more effective. Even finding really small changes for the better can have giant impacts, especially when thinking on the federal level, and I think a lot of this could be easily scaled down to a local level, assuming things are being tracked and analyzed.

As always, if you have any questions please let me know. Otherwise, have a great week and look for the final draft of the plan to cross your inbox on Friday.