2003 Community Survey

Introduction

2003 Community Survey

2003 Student Community Survey

Acknowledgements

Methods

Analysis

Who Participated? (Part 2)

How Did Participants Rate the Issues?: (Part 3)

Montgomery County in the Future (Part 4, Question 1)

Strategies & Solutions (Part 4, Question 2)

Places to Conserve (Part 4, Question 3)

Places to Develop (Part 4, Question 4)

Mapping Project

Places to Conserve (Part 4, Question 3)

Places to Develop (Part 4, Question 3)

Mapping Project Results (Part 5)

Data:

Demographics (Part 2)

Element Data

 

 

 

Note: The illustrations included in Montgomery County, 2025 were drawn by students enrolled in area schools. The drawings represent the students' views of their homes, their neighborhoods, and their county.

Introduction

If you drove from Blacksburg to Christiansburg, before 1975, you would see Corning on right and a small strip mall, anchored by a Cheds store, on the left. While there were houses edging 460, the majority of the land was still agricultural and the town edges were still reasonably well defined. In 1975, Riner and Prices Fork were still small villages, surrounded by farm land, and separated from the other populated areas of the county by narrow two-lane roads and reasonably light traffic. The only golf courses were located in or near Blacksburg and Christiansburg. Aside from the Radford Arsenal and Corning, the only major industrial parks were located in Blacksburg and Christiansburg. Indeed, the economy was defined more by the Arsenal, agriculture and the two universities (Virginia Tech and Radford University, located in the adjacent city of Radford). Virginia Tech was still in the midst of rapid expansion, following the change from an all-male military institution to a co-ed university. While there were new subdivisions being built, most were located adjacent to the two major population centers (Blacksburg and Christiansburg).

The population of Montgomery County, in 1975, was 58,400. By 2000, the population of Montgomery County had grown to 83,629, a 40% increase. The farmland that separated Blacksburg and Christiansburg was gone, replaced by increasingly urban growth patterns; the edges of the two towns and the villages of Riner and Prices Fork were changed and obscured by residential growth; the town commercial centers had shifted to an expanding mall area between the two towns and on the northern border of Christiansburg; traffic was increasingly congested, before VDoT constructed a new bypass from I-81 to Blacksburg; the economy and labor market shifted away from agriculture and increasingly towards retail and commercial enterprises and industrial growth. Indeed, the only constant was the continuing impact of Virginia Tech.

In 2000, Montgomery County started the process of revising and updating the county's comprehensive plan. The changes over the past 25 years, however, suggested that the comprehensive plan needed more than a simple update. The population, on the whole, is far more diverse, and the issues facing the county are far more complex than they were in 1975 when the county first started thinking in terms of long range planning. Rather than repeating the processes used in 1977, 1983, and 1990, the Planning Commission and the Planning Department decided to try a whole new approach, an approach that relies heavily on the provision of public information on the one hand and public participation and input on the other. Indeed, Montgomery County, 2025 is a community-driven comprehensive plan.

The Community Facilitators Initiative and Community Survey is part of Phase IV of the comprehensive planning process. Starting on January 2nd, the Montgomery County Planning Department, with the help of community facilitators from a broad range of community organizations, has been distributing copies of the community survey to Montgomery County residents and workers and the student survey through the Montgomery County Public Schools. The Planning Department decided that, given the plan's timeframe (22 years), students (k-12) should be included in the planning process.

 

Methods and Analysis of Methods

Survey Construction. The survey included four basic parts: demographics, issue ranking, open ended questions, and the Montgomery County mapping project. Unlike previous comprehensive plan surveys, the Community Survey allowed participants who worked in the county, but who did not live in the county. In addition, the Planning Department wanted to know how many of the participants were new to the comprehensive plan input process. Much of the demographic questions were meant to help the department gauge whether or not the survey was reaching a cross-section of the population.

With the exception of the "e-government" question, the "How Important is This Issue" section was developed from the sub-category list from previous comprehensive plan community meetings. The department wanted to find out which issues, raised over the preceeding two years, carried the greatest amount of weight with survey participants. The e-government question was included because of the emphasis the Montgomery County government is placing on electronic outreach, most notably with the County's web page. Recognizing that new issues may well have emerged in the period between the last community input session and the administration of the Community Survey, three lines were added at the bottom of the issue list to allow participants to add issues they felt were omited from the list. In addition, participants in the group input sessions were asked to circle their top three issues. Half the surveys were, however, filled out by individuals without a specific affiliation with an organization or belonged to organizations which chose to distribute the survey without holding the group input session. The second open-ended question provided a guide for respondents major concerns, even when they did not circle their top issues. The list of issues was meant to provide some guidance to staff in weighing the relative importance of issues included in each of the 11 elements (Cultural Facilities, Economic Development, Education, Environment, Health and Safety, Housing, Government, Parks and Recreation, Planning, Transportation, and Utilities).

Part 4 of the survey asked four open-ended questions: 1) the participant's vision of Montgomery County in 2025; 2) solutions and strategies for their top three concerns; 3) areas of the county they would like to see preserved; and 4) areas of the county they would like to see developed and the types of development they felt was appropriate to the location. The first and second questions were meant to provide some guidance to department staff in developing the initial list of goals and objectives. The third and fourth questions provided additional information for the mapping project and, ultimately, the development of the Comprehensive Plan map, which will be developed after Montgomery County, 2025 has been approved by the Montgomery County Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors.

Part 5 was something of an experiment and was intended to provide some idea of how residents see their own county, geographically, and find out which areas of the Montgomery County county residents valued as conservation areas and where they felt development was most appropriate. The jury is still out on whether or not the project will provide any additional information that more traditional methods might have missed.

In addition to the community survey, Planning Department staff also developed a survey to be distributed to students in the Montgomery County Public Schools and private schools which expressed an interest. Through the efforts of Drs. Morton and Roger with the Montgomery County Public Schools, Mary North and Penny Franklin with the Montgomery County School Board, and, most especially, Ellen Harkrader and Kitty Brennan ( a member of the Planning Commission), retired teachers who took an interest in the process, student surveys and community surveys (for the faculty and staff) were distributed to every school in Montgomery County. The student survey was designed to be used in the classroom and included a number of writing prompts and shorter projects which could be modified as need be.

Community Facilititator's Initiative. The Community Facilitator's Initiative was introduced to address a glaring problem with community input in the comprehensive planning process--namely the lack of broad based community participation. Although not as broadly publicized as would perhaps have been ideal, the initiative did recieve fairly broad-based support from the different communities in Montgomery County.

The initiative relied on the redefinition of community from the more traditional definition based on geography to one that used a definition of community based on resident interactions and connections (social, civic, political, religious, cultural, community, and commercial organizations) within the broader community, not just their particular neighborhood. Part of the impetus for this approach was a recognition of the validity of Alexis de Tocqueville's observation of the American character: "Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associaitions." (Democracy in America, pg. 515) and a concern that Robert D. Putman was indeed correct when he noted, in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, that Americans have become disengaged from public affairs and the broader community inwhich they live. Certainly, low turnouts at prior comprehensive plan community meetings, despite ample publicity, suggested that very few Montgomery County residents were either engage in or marginally interested in issues surrounding planning in Montgomery County, despite the long-term impacts that changes in the Comprehensive Plan and the tools which implement the plan (Zoning Ordinance, Subdivision Ordinance, Capital Improvements Program, and Comprehensive Plan Map) have on most county residents.

Staff from the Montgomery County Planning Department, starting in late September 2002, contacted community organizations and pitched participation in the comprehensive planning process. Each organization was asked to provide one member who would be willing to function as a community facilitator, someone who could facilitate a comprehensive plan input session during one of the organizations regularly scheduled meetings during January and February, 2003. The survey was designed with these input sessions in mind. The facilitator would distribute the survey to the members, at the meeting, would help members fill out the survey and a group response flip chart, collect the materials at the end of the meeting, and return the materials to the Montgomery County Planning Department by March 1, 2003. Follow-up phone calls and emails helped maintain contact with the various organizations.

The community facilitators each attended a one hour training session held by the Planning Department during the first two weeks of January. In addition to copies of the survey, they were given the group response flip chart, maps, newsletters, and a facilitators guide.

Modifications in the Community Facilitator's Initiative. As luck would have it, Montgomery County (and the rest of the mid-Atlantic region of the United States) had one of the worst winters we've had in many years. Schools were closed for better than 11 days in January and February due to snow and ice. Schools weren't the only ones affected by the weather. Organizations cancelled monthly meetings, churches closed, and much of the normal routine for a great many people was disrupted.The organzations that went ahead and met often has much smaller than expected attendance. Needless to say, the weather also wrecked havoc on the Community Faciliator's Initiative. The final date for the input process was extended to April 1 to give organizations and the schools a chance to complete their surveys.Surveys were distributed to more than 100 organizations. Despite the weather, 68 different organizations (geographic, educational, civic, cultural, social, commercial, and religious), representing a broad cross section of the county population, participated in the process to one degree or another. In addition, of those who participated in the process, 75% had never participated in a comprehensive planning community forum prior to the survey.

Processing the Quantitative Data. The majority of the quantitative data from the survey was processed by an outside volunteer, C. A. Linstrom, a social science researcher with a copy of SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). The data was entered into a database and proofread by a minimum of two different people to guarantee the accuracy of the data. SPSS allows for a greater range of data analysis. The methods statement that follows was provided by Ms. Lindstrom.

Processing the Qualitative Data. The qualitative data, including margin notes, additional comments, and extended letters, were typed into an Excel data. The data was sorted, using content analysis, twice: 1) into the eleven element categories and one miscellaneous comment category for comments which fell outside of typical planning categories; and 2) data in each category was sorted into sub-categories. In cases where comments fell into more than one category or the information in one sub-category would be related to more than one category, materials were linked to other relavant areas. In the case of the futures statements (vision statement), the full text of the statements were placed in all relavant categories and the comments which related to the particular category were typed in bold. This method was used so that the comments would not lose their context. Indeed, very few of the comments were entirely discrete and most were context dependent.

Publication of the Data. Where possible, the raw data has been included in this report (see the specific element categories for links to the raw data). Where it was not possible, frequency, correlation, deviation, and crosstab tables have been included to help translate the charts and graphs included in this report. Questions about the data included in this report should be directed to M.H. Dorsett, Montgomery County Planning Department, 540-382-5750.

Analysis

Demographics (Part 2)

Specific Issues: (Part 3)

Montgomery County in the Future (Part 4, Question 1)

Strategies & Solutions (Part 4, Question 2)

Places to Conserve (Part 4, Question 3)

Places to Develop (Part 4, Question 4)

Mapping Project

Places to Conserve (Part 4, Question 3)

Places to Develop (Part 4, Question 3)

Mapping Project Results (Part 5)

 

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Last Updated: 16 April, 2003
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