Thoughts from the Clovis Shaw planning meeting
The subject of my last post was about the city of Clovis holding three planning meetings concerning Shae Ave.
I attended the second meeting, held in the afternoon. The meeting was not well publicized, as there was no notice (that I could see) in the paper. On the website, the information was listed, but the way the site is set up makes it hard to find.
Apparently, the expectation was that only business owners would attend, because the first question asked was which business each member of the audience owns. I assume they sent out flyers to each business on the corridor.
Now when I say audience, I mean a grand total of six members of the public, less than the 7 members of the city that were on-hand. The lack of outreach and the lack of response is somewhat typical of planning here, both in Clovis and in Fresno. The local population is not very engaged with how the city is being planned, which is partially why there are so many ways in which the planning is poor. According to the city staff, the morning meeting had more people, but that’s not saying much. I think that the lack of engagement by the community is taken by the city as a sign that everyone approves of how things have been done. As I’ll get to later, according to one of the planners, that’s sort of how the council sees it.