The Addition of the Professional Planners
We were flattered with the number of national and local planning groups who submitted proposals to lead our public outreach effort. After great deliberation, we chose ECOS Environmental Design, a small Atlanta based group whom we felt had a passion to help challenge stale concepts and we suspected they could join us in imagining what we could accomplish with what seemed like an impossible task.
Shannon Kettering was assigned as the ECOS project manager for the Chattahoochee Hill Country effort. Shannon was in her first year with ECOS, fresh from the academic world after completing her Master’s degree in Urban and Environmental Planning the year before at the University of Virginia. Shannon was fresh and optimistic. She had not been beaten down by the regulators and financial analysts who steadily squeeze the optimism of new ideas out of the bright people entering the professional planning and design world.
With ECOS by our side, we started. The first community wide public meeting was scheduled for February 12, 2002. We made arrangements to send a post card to every property address in the Fulton County tax records for this area in an effort to connect with all decision makers in the 40,000 acre rural countryside.
The big question was, can we get people to show up to a public meeting? Historically, people in this area did not attend Fulton County meetings, or meetings of any kind in meaningful numbers. We discussed for some time if we should send a letter or post card. Remember, this is before the internet was widely used and Face Book had not entered the scene. Face Book would debut three years later on Ivy League campuses. Realizing this, reminds us how fast somethings have changed. Reflections like this while writing the history does make me feel old I must admit.
The communication we were designing needed to confirm that the threat we had been talking about in our coffee talks was upon us. The possibility of our fields and forests being graded bare for endless loops of houses was a real threat. But at the same time we wanted to offer hope and empowerment. Many people were talking abut the forest along Carlton Road in Palmetto that had been stripped bare exposing the red clay field. Sprouting out of the baron earth were the frames for a simple housing development. There was great fear this cookie cutter, treeless form of development would spread like kudzu down Hutcheson Ferry Road and across what we now know as Chattahoochee Hills.
We decided to simply share two images - one of what we didn’t want to lose and one that we didn’t want to allow. Below is a snapshot of that card with a picture of a local pasture with cows grazing and the other of the emerging treeless rows of houses being built on CarltonRoad. The back of the card read simply “Community meeting to determine our future. February 12, 6:00pm, Rico Community Center.
