City should look at community engagement process in Geneva, manager says
Hearkening back to a speech Jason Molino made at a City Council meeting in October, the city manager has asked council members to read a 74-page report from Geneva about its community-improvement efforts.
It isn't that Molino thinks the specific recommendations in the Geneva report are right for Batavia, but he's impressed by the process Geneva went through, and the effort it's putting forth at community development.
The report fits right in with everything Molino previously said about the need to improve community engagement among residents at a neighborhood level.
"It was an engaging process, a planning process where they took actual housing data, actual income data and data from residents in the community and said 'This is what the neighborhoods are made up of. Here are areas to focus on in each neighborhood to achieve some better results,'" Molino said during an interview Friday. "When you’re dealing with limited resources, I think that’s the targeted approach you have to take."
Based on the report and Molino's previous speech, the city manager is aiming to take a much broader approach to improve the quality of life in Batavia. Just throwing money at a problem or ramping up code enforcement isn't going to do the job, and he said as much Friday.
"What’s interesting is they talk about how different neighborhoods need to have different senses of identity and community building aspects of that -- you know, neighborhood pride, neighborhood identity, more so than we need to get in and inspect all these properties."
The approach Geneva is taking isn't for pansies or naysayers. It says quite clearly the city needs to become more entrepreneurial, which means risk, which means trying things that might not work, and not stop trying.
A word on success. The strategies here are not bulletproof. Not all will work the first time. Some won't work after repeated attempts, and so iteration and persistence will be required. The city must be willing to experiment and be flexible. We strongly recommend that the City of Geneva itself become entrepreneurial, that it take measured risks. In these economic times the margin for error is small, but we think the conditions in Geneva require that the city be innovative. This may mean failing in order to succeed, but learning from failure and moving forward, and always within the context of the guiding principles contained in this report.
