How Data and Civic Engagement are Transforming Indiana County
Tags: Civic Engagement, Planning, Urban Planning, Data, Data Visualization

A mySidewalk Case Study and Data Discovery Story

Of the tasks required of planners, one of the most challenging undertakings is to successfully include the voices of people whose lives are directly influenced by change — namely, the community members.

For example, what would you do if you realized university enrollment was changing the make-up of the neighborhoods in your community — a slow, but significant adjustment few had planned for? How can you connect with these students, families, and the older residents in your city about planning issues? Most importantly, how do we use good data to make stronger decisions, and how do we connect community members to these decisions?

mySidewalk’s Jill Applegate interviewed Jeff Raykes, Deputy Director of the planning section at Indiana County, Pennsylvania about how he is creating more-informed engagement efforts, using mySidewalk along with other outreach strategies to connect with a wide variety of generations and interests in local communities.

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When working with a diverse demographic, it can be difficult to make the concept of data-driven planning accessible and appealing. Raykes has experienced this challenge firsthand through multiple projects he’s worked on during his 10 years in the county offices.

“One of the big challenges,” Raykes said, “is making planning relevant. So that’s been one of our goals or core values, is that we’re trying to connect people to planning.”

Indiana County is a primarily rural county situated in western Pennsylvania, made up of 38 municipalities. The Indiana County Office of Planning and Development has five sections, including planning, housing, infrastructure, uniform construction code, and economic development. The planning section, where Raykes works, specifically oversees the transportation, land use, and long-range planning for the county.

“In our little section, we do a lot of the community planning,” Raykes said. “We’re working on comprehensive plans quite often — we’re either working on a comprehensive plan or a comp plan update almost constantly in our office.”

The county office’s main focus is community development at the local level. According to Raykes, they’ll suggest to a local government that they start a project, and then staff the project with their county-level planners to guide the process.

“If [a municipality doesn’t] have a planning department, we’ll go out there and point out that the comprehensive plan needs to be updated,” Raykes said. “That’s what we spend the majority of our time on, is doing projects like that. It helps them, and they don’t have to hire a consultant.”

When working on these projects, it can often be difficult to engage community members of varying ages in the planning process. With the advent of social media and other useful engagement strategies, Raykes is glad to be relying less on public meetings as the sole source of community input. However, the struggle to find the best way to include community voices in the decision-making process is ongoing.

“When I started here, social media wasn’t as popular as it is now and outreach efforts primarily were public meetings that nobody came to,” Raykes said. “One of the obligations of good planning is finding ways to make it relevant across your entire demographics, which is extremely challenging.”

The Indiana Community University District Master Plan is a recent example of that challenge. The county seat of Indiana County is the borough of Indiana, which is home to about 14,000 people, the majority of which attend the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. As the college has grown, the town has struggled to adapt to changing land use and housing patterns.

“Obviously there’s the town-gown divide… so you get these areas where you have very high concentrations of students, and essentially the character of the neighborhood changes,” Raykes said. “That’s a pretty massive change, slowly happening with each enrollment cycle, but no one’s thinking about it or talking about it, and so the cumulative effect is that you have very significant changes in terms of these neighborhoods.”

After seeing the lack of preparation for these ongoing changes, the county planning department decided a master plan with suggestions for land use would help the borough and the surrounding township continue to grow responsibly.

The team had to grapple with a few key issues throughout the duration of the project. First, the transient nature of the student population made data collection difficult.

“The data for this community shows that 80 percent are college students. But what does that mean? Does that mean they’re commuting? The University of Pittsburgh is an hour away, and there’s other colleges around here, so you almost have to back into that number,” Raykes said. “With this particular project, it’s unique because it takes more work to get something you can use. But if you take an average community… data there is awesome.”

Raykes also pointed out the current obstructions for obtaining data from the planning office.

“The problem is, it’s just a new thing,” Raykes said. “If you wanted to [look at data] now, you’d have to come into the planning office, schedule some time, fill out a map request. It’s just onerous. Essentially, why are we making it so hard? People need data to make good decisions. At least, that’s what I would argue.”

The second key challenge was the broad age range and interests of the constituents, which forced the team to get creative with their outreach.

“We knew we needed a mix [of engagement strategies] and we knew we were starting from scratch, so if we were to just run an ad in the paper to try and get people to a public meeting, no college students are ever going to see that,” Raykes said. “We did intentional face to face things. I went to SGA (Student Governing Association) like three times. We would do presentations, we’d ask questions, we hit Twitter. With the senior citizens, we would go to their community meetings. I’ve never been to so many meetings.”

With the master plan recently completed, the borough can now use it to help guide land use decisions as the population continues to grow and change. Raykes is excited to see the way the community develops.

“We went into this master planning process and we talked a lot about placemaking. When you think about it, it’s so exciting and cool to think that public spaces should do something to be memorable, and to generate a feeling,” Raykes said.

“That was really fun for me, to ask ‘How should the areas around the university campus make you feel?’ Great places generate a certain feeling.”

Raykes sees placemaking as a potential solution to the issues communities are facing in his county.

“Every community, especially in southwestern Pennsylvania, the population is declining. People are leaving,” Raykes said. “If we’re going to be successful and, at the very least, retain our population, we’ve got to do something different.”

Trying something new can be especially challenging when not everyone can agree on the best steps to take. A new project to construct a multimodal corridor in the Indiana borough, connecting a heavily used trail to the downtown and IUP campus, has stirred up some push back from the community.

“The problem is, if I can do a complete street, that’s what’s going to keep people here. Then, the response would be, ‘No, it’s getting a job,’” Raykes said. “We would say, ‘Well, sure. It’s not either-or. It’s and-both.”

Helping community members understand the purpose of planning and get on board with new projects and ideas may be a good step forward.

“We’ve got to think about what we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong, and then make some really tough decisions about that,” Raykes said. “That’s where I think mySidewalk becomes part of the mix, because people can start to interact with the same stuff that I’m interacting with.”

Overall, Raykes sees the need for good data and community engagement as a tough, but exciting challenge.

“When I look at the future of planning here in Indiana County, we’re in some form of decline in most communities. How do we use good data, how do we make good decisions, and how do we connect people to making decisions about the future?” Raykes said. “I guess the challenge wrapped up in all that is: How do we get communities to think about themselves differently?”

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If you’re wanting to help community members engage with your projects, you’re in luck. mySidewalk just released a new tool that allows you to share customizable, interactive maps and gather feedback with the click of a button. Learn more about Sharable Maps here, or test them out yourself by requesting a free 7-day mySidewalk trial.