The Southern Georgia Regional Commission, as the designated Metropolitan Planning Organization for Valdosta and Lowndes County, received the National Award for Outstanding Overall Achievement in Metropolitan Transportation Planning for cities under 200,000 population last week in Fort Worth, Texas at the Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations Annual Conference.
 
The award recognizes the work of local governments to develop an innovative planning process and coordinate local and regional planning efforts for the benefit of the greater community. In 2013, the SGRC started a nearly 30 month process to update our long-range transportation plan. Local leaders saw the opportunity to combine the efforts of a socioeconomic data study and developing a vision and goals with other planning efforts underway in the community, including a comprehensive plan and a housing plan. The staff of the SGRC led the efforts for the development of a Common Community Vision for Lowndes County alongside the 2040 Transportation Vision Plan.
 
Through a four-month public and stakeholder input process, a Common Community Vision was developed from more than 800 statements from the public, stakeholders, and more than 25 local, regional, and state plans. New and existing partnerships were developed with organizations ranging from local school boards, to hospitals, to tourism agencies. These partnerships are becoming even stronger as the Common Community Vision continues to be used in the community. This partnership with local and regional planners allowed fiscal and staff resources to be shared over diverse planning efforts to develop plans that are linked to one another through a Common Community Vision that contains shared goals and objectives. Planners are continuing to document the achievements of the Common Community Vision through annual reports highlighting local efforts to meet the goals adopted by the community leaders. You can view these annual reports on our website at www.sgrc.us. The Common Community Vision was used in the development of Policies, Issues, and Opportunities for the Greater Lowndes County Comprehensive Plan, which was adopted by all local governments in October 2016.
 
The 2040 Transportation Vision Plan includes 18 goals that relate to the ways in which transportation can positively impact education, workforce development, public health and safety, natural resources, tourism, and utility infrastructure. Building on the successful public and stakeholder involvement that took place during the development of the Common Community Vision, the input for the Transportation Vision Plan for the Valdosta-Lowndes County MPO included sessions where the public could vote on transportation projects, prioritize the transportation goals, and vote on the allocation of more than $1 Billion in transportation funds over the next 25 years. This input helped our local leaders prioritize and develop a Transportation Vision Plan. This Plan includes a Complete Streets Strategy, an Intersection Improvement Strategy that prioritizes safety, and an Active, Healthy Lifestyles Strategy that encourages each local government to spend at least $500,000 annually on bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure and safety education programs such as Safe Routes to School. The Transportation Vision Plan prioritizes system preservation by allocating more than 50% of available funding to maintaining and operating existing highway and transit infrastructure.
 
This multi-faceted project has been successful in various ways. For example, new partnerships and coordination efforts have been developed between agencies and individuals who previously may not have been active in the land use or transportation planning processes. Various local government partners have been brought together to share resources and develop common strategies for better community development. The planning momentum that was achieved through the 2040 Transportation Vision Plan has motivated the community to continue tackling complex transportation issues, such as implementing an urban transit system and mitigating the impacts of truck traffic in a historic downtown.
 
Together, the Common Community Vision and Transportation Vision Plan provide holistic guidance for improving many aspects of the community, including economic development and quality of life. The development of the Transportation Vision Plan served to promote the Common Community Vision in order to bring together new partnerships and strengthen other relationships, raising awareness communitywide of the close interconnection that exists between the many various aspects of the community. The Transportation Vision Plan has allowed local economic development leaders to point to a document that outlines investments in multi-modal transportation infrastructure and is supported by multiple local governments.
 
The momentum built from the adoption of the Transportation Vision Plan has carried through with a transit implementation study for the Valdosta Urbanized Area (one of only a handful in the country that does not have an urban transit system) and a downtown truck traffic study. Both studies propose innovative and cost-effective options for combating two very different transportation issues in the community. Both of these studies have been completed and are available for review at www.sgrc.us.
 
This multi-year, multi-product project was innovative in the way in which we utilized the components of a metropolitan transportation plan (socioeconomic data, vision, goals, and public involvement) and turned them into useable reports, documents and plans that the entire community could use and be proud of to support. The Common Community Vision, in particular, represented a unique and innovative project in that it brought together goals, objectives, and policies from over 25 local plans and unified them into a single coordinated vision and set of goals, developed with extensive public involvement.