Today was your chance to be a Visionary, to think and plan the Fort Lauderdale of tomorrow!
Unfortunately, very few of you took part.
For the last few years, the City has been trying to take stock, figure out what kind of City it wants to be when it grows up.
The Visioning effort, designed to do just that, has been slowly, sometimes painfully, working its’ way toward todays’ Visioning finale – the Citizens Visioning Summit.
The Summit was advertised heavily, but the turn out was very weak.
Mayor Seiler, in his opening remarks, said he was frustrated at the low turn out. Seiler said as he glanced at the crowd of about 100 people and saw the same usual volunteers that he sees around City Hall.
Seiler attended with his colleagues (except Commissioner Rodstrom, who didn’t attend) and finished his remarks by joking that he had gotten quite a few good ideas by e-mail from the citizens concerning Vision. He said he sent the good ones right off to Manager Feldmans’ email box, and put the rest in another box on his own computer!
The Summit was well done. About ten groups talked about things like Infrastructure, Flooding, Trains and Trolleys and Culture. After the ideas were discussed, everyone got up and dot voted on the ones they liked best.
The charts were then packed up and sent off to be tabulated.
And in the end, the participants got a chance to listen to the children, that had been in a separate room at “Vision Camp”.
The kids gave their names and what they wanted to be when they grew up.
We got a good idea of what they had been doing all morning while their parents were Visioning – most said they wanted to design Legos when they grew up!
( … And thanks to Art Seitz for the photography)