Road Work Ahead
An Iowa program brings transportation planning to rural communities.
By Sherrie Voss Matthews
While working as a landscape architect for Iowa State University's extension office in the mid-1990s, Julia Badenhope drove through more small Iowa towns than she could count. On those field visits, she noticed that many of the towns she passed through could benefit from professional design services, but they simply didn't have the finances to hire planners. She had the kernel of an idea ‹ to find a way to make planning not only more accessible and affordable to rural communities, but also to get residents thinking about the possibilities.
As she talked with citizens of several small towns, transportation problems kept cropping up ‹ they wanted to beautify their roadways, create better access to bike trails, and often, just create better access, period.
In 1994, Badenhope started developing a community design program to deal with social action as well as the transportation projects in rural towns.
Twelve years later, Iowa's Living Roadways Community Visioning Program is thriving. It received the 2006 Outstanding Planning Award for a Project, Program, or Tool for helping to teach officials and residents in small towns how to think about design, develop plans, write grants, compete for federal transportation funds, and look for private donations.
How it works
Badenhope, now an associate professor of architecture at Iowa State University, says that when she brought the Living Roadways program to the Iowa Department of Transportation, the agency was very interested. IDOT and Iowa State set up a contractual arrangement that charged the university's department of landscape architecture and the university extension with administering the program using state and federal funds.
Iowa State brought Trees Forever, a nonprofit environmental organization based in Marion, Iowa, into the partnership to facilitate the planning process. The group assists local committees with goal setting and evaluating local landscape and transportation resources. The university recruits and develops planning teams of students and practitioners, who work with the local committees to develop transportation enhancement plans. An $8,000 grant administered through the program goes toward securing contractual services that smaller towns would not normally be able to afford.
Some 113 communities have participated in the visioning program since 1996. Within two years, more than 90 percent of the communities had completed at least one phase of their projects, and about 70 percent had ongoing projects, according to a 1998 evaluation.
Each year the program accepts 12 communities to begin the community visioning process. Each community has to put up $1,000, explain why it wants to participate, and develop a steering committee, which is responsible for the process.
Once selected, that committee works with facilitators from Trees Forever who help run charrettes and clarify goals. Iowa State hires landscape architects to work with the local committees to develop a plan, and the university pairs up each town with an architecture student intern, who spends 400 hours in the spring and summer working with the committee. While the projects vary, the Trees Forever team, local committee, students, and professional planner typically meet 10 times throughout the process.
At the end that process, which takes about four months, the local committees come away with a visioning plan, presentation boards, and other written and visual materials to help explain their future plans. The IDOT grant covers the costs of the visioning process, and the program helps the community identify funding resources for implementing the plan.
Once Iowa's Living Roadways Visioning Program has helped develop the conceptual design, the community often will hire a landscape architect to do the actual work or work with local volunteer community groups. In addition to getting initial projects done, the visioning program helps rural towns build a network of resources for future projects.
From plan to practice
In many rural places, highways took over Main Streets several decades ago, notes Sandy Oberbroeckling, Iowa's Living Roadways program coordinator. But later, when interstates came through, the suddenly less-traveled highways never reverted to traditional Main Streets again. Many of the projects imagined by the visioning program have been local solutions to this common problem.
Parkersburg (pop. 1,889), in north central Iowa, is taking advantage of the rerouting of U.S. Highway 20 to reclaim its Main Street and downtown. Meg Flenker of Flenker Land Architecture Consultants in Long Grove, Iowa, says the 1998 visioning process opened the community's eyes to the amenities within its small town. Residents took a fresh look at things they had taken for granted, such as Beaver Creek, and noticed nuisances, such as offset streets and chopped-up blocks that the highway had created.
"A lot of poor planning had been done in the past," Flenker says. "We proposed a recreation trail along Beaver Creek to link schools and downtown with a trail that would tie in with the rest of the community."
Parkersburg had never done a major community-wide plan, relying on ad hoc planning to get individual projects done. The visioning process taught the community how to gather private donations ‹ money from pancake breakfasts, Rotary International, and the Lions Club ‹ to implement projects according to the plan. Flenker says that the town has already begun to think about other projects, such as downtown streetscape improvements, historic building restorations, historic preservation ordinances, and incentives for businesses to move downtown.
In 2004, Al Bohling, senior landscape architect at Shive Hattery in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, began working with residents of Montrose (pop. 957) through the Living Roadways program. The city, located in southeast Iowa on the Mississippi River, sought to take advantage of its location and historic past: It lies along the nationally designated Great River Road and is near an important temple, built by the Mormon community after it fled Missouri but before it settled in Utah. In 2005, the visioning work helped the city to get a $73,000 National Scenic Byway grant to complete an area master plan.
Bohling has worked with Iowa's Living Roadways Visioning Program for nine years and says that most of the time, fostering hometown pride and getting up some momentum is all it takes to make an area blossom. "Montrose is on the Mississippi River and has a great view," Bohling says. "They also have great human resources ‹ people willing to volunteer time, fill out grant applications, and lobby politicians."
Program creator Badenhope says Living Roadways has succeeded in showing smaller communities what planning can accomplish, and how beneficial a vision, master plan, and knowledge of available grants and other funding sources can be. She adds that communities that can sustain the energy needed to implement their visioning plans are starting to reap the benefits of their hard work.
She enjoys seeing how far some rural communities have come in 10 years, comparing them to growing children. "You raise them, you send them out, and you just know you have no control at a certain point," she says. "We've had small towns do amazing things."
For more information on the program, contact Julia Badenhope at jmb@iastate.edu.
Sherrie Voss Matthews
Matthews is a freelance writer in Springfield, Missouri.
