Imagine that assertion, dear readers, friends and neighbors. Let's get played for fools all over again! Say what? We have all been "Mystified" . . .There's a civic tech app for that - "crowd funding" development. All done by manipulating click fixes when a group named Neighborlands, a 3rd Party contractor hired by the city, launched Imagine Mesa, a digital forum for community engagement.
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Quick Blogger Comment: (1) Wearing sneakers-and-shorts is the City of Mesa's Director of Downtown Transformation Jeff MacVay. (2) In the right foreground are The Strothers, husband-and-wife owners of a sandwich shop downtown, who were named in January 2019 as the private operators of the Mesa Farmers Market & Flea . . .scratch your head about that!
"The City made the public’s ask for a farmer’s market downtown a reality, offering use of a city park, selecting a market operator and providing marketing assistance."
(3) There's already been a farmers market downtown for years that fizzled-out scheduled on a Friday when the biggest employer downtown is closed to enjoy a 4-day workweek, and a Farmers Market at Fitch Farm on N Center Street. (4) The difference now is that the city spent over $12M to renovate Pioneer Park (original budget $6.9M) and really needs to justify that overblown expense to attract some people to a public park close to the Temple Area that's currently a construction site for a Massive Mormon Make-Over just blocks away from downtown.
THE OTHER REALITY >
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“We want Mesa to be a bottoms-up community. The seven of us [on the City Council] are not sitting here because we are the smartest people in the city or because we’re the ones who have the best ideas in the city. That’s not the case. We have a very capable community that has lots of talent and resources, and we want to draw on that. This approach helps us be better at what we’re doing.” – Mayor John Giles
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What the Double-Talk Is Jivin' John Giles talking here >
real estate trends and hot housing markets across the country
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The City of Mesa City Council, led by @MayorGiles, asked residents how to improve their city – now they're investing $300 million together.
Here's a case study on how they did it.
- Twitter post by Dan Parham, CEO of Neighborlands 14 March 2019
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Imagine Mesa
CEO, Neighborland
HOLD ON! What the hell happened after this third-party paid contractor jiggered all the data collected and made outrageous claims?
"Over the course of 2017 and 2018, the City of Mesa engaged over 67,000 participants on their strategic planning and capital improvement budgeting process. Imagine Mesa was led by Mayor John Giles, the Mesa City Council, and an Advisory Committee of local leaders. In November of 2018, voters approved $300 million in municipal bonds to bring these ideas to reality. . . Forums were organized by areas where the City had enough local control to make ideas a reality,
> The campaign resulted in over 250,000 minutes (5,000 hours) of participation, generating 465 ideas and 6,000 votes
> The targeted online campaign involved 137 social media posts which appeared in 238,000 social media feeds.
All of this engagement cost the city less than $1 per resident. HOW MUCH????
> The most popular idea on Imagine Mesa was to encourage Arizona State University to expand to downtown Mesa . . . . . . Blogger Note: that's in a city of over 475,000 people and a BIG HYPE at best It turns out that one guy - Sean Huntington - managed to pull that one off by pulling in less than 450 responses from August-October. That's not much but look how city officials used that non-representative sample of the entire population to wage a public relations campaign to overturn what taxpayers REJECTED just two years earlier. . . The Mesa City Council approved a master plan to design and construct a 5 story building and 2–3 acre open plaza with the sale of excise tax bonds.
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Here's what we get two years later:The latest buzz-phrase catching fire in planning and technology? Smart city concepts. ???????????????????????????????? |
| This is the way smart people work better |
From Property Lines* (see below)
Tech is fostering civic engagement—by letting citizens suggest their own development policies
The various strains of reactive infrastructure and efficient transportation that make up these new ideas for smart cities suggest a cleaner, less crowded, and more clever version of urban life is right around the corner.
How civic tech can steer development and create smarter cities
Civic-minded techies are finding ways to digitize, demystify, and improve local government
