After an outcry by some respondents to high-density choices in a questionnaire that’s part of a new Johnson Ferry-Shallowford master plan, county officials overseeing the project will send out a revised survey next week.
(Here’s our post from earlier this week about the pushback).
An “image preference survey” designed to get public feedback about possible residential and commercial buildings will be reworked to include more “suburban-style” options (as seen above), especially for housing, according to Jason Gaines.
Gaines, the planning director for the Cobb Community Development Agency, told members of the East Cobb Civic Association on Wednesday that he’s prepared a new survey that’s in draft form.
Many of the buildings shown in the survey were several stories high, alarming some residents who felt that their choices may be limited to structures that are better suited for urban areas.
“The goal was to learn whether people like or don’t like” the styles of buildings, Gaines said. “We’ve got to a little bit more to do but that’s okay.”
Gaines, who is spearheading a series of public meetings about the master plan (called “JOSH” to indicate the main street name in the Johnson Ferry-Shallowford corridor), said around 200 people have responded to the survey online, and the feedback has been wide-ranging.
The image preference survey has been a similar component of other master plan updates. Cobb commissioner Bob Ott, whose District 2 now includes the Johnson Ferry-Shallowford area, asked for a new survey to be drawn.
He told East Cobb News that the original survey was approved by a 20-person stakeholders committee that includes citizens and business owners in the JOSH area.
Ott said there are no outside consultants influencing the survey options, and that the work preparing the materials is all being done by county staff.
This is the fourth master plan project he has requested for his district, including Vinings, Powers Ferry and Johnson Ferry (whose design guidelines were adopted this week).
“We’ve done this three other times, and every time the community has been supportive,” Ott said. “It’s not about what we or the staff thinks. It’s what the community thinks.”
He admitted that sometimes the staff selections for a survey are “a shot in the dark,” but they’re done as much to learn what a community doesn’t want as much as what it prefers.
The final JOSH public input meeting was supposed to have been May 9 but Gaines said there will be another meeting, on May 23, to give citizens time to respond to the new survey.
In addition, Gaines said two stakeholders meetings will take place in June to analyze all of the public response before any formal action is taken to update the master plan.
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