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Expert urges Billings to plan with great vision – Great Opportunitities Abound

Urban planning expert Anton C. Nelessen says Billings is a "planner’s dream."

Not for what it is, but for what it could become. Nelessen said he has been so impressed by the possibilities in Billings that he is thinking of giving the city a separate chapter in his forthcoming book, "What America Wants."

By ED KEMMICK
Of The Gazette Staff

Billings is a microcosm of what’s happening all across the country, and it is in the rare position of being a fairly large city surrounded by hundreds of miles of "hinterlands," he said.

That geographic fact gives Billings an opportunity to set standards for residential and commercial projects that developers will have no choice but to live with because they have nowhere else to go, he said.

"If you don’t ask for it, you’re not going to get it," Nelessen said during a public presentation Friday evening. "You’re going to get the same schlock everyone else gets."

A day earlier, at a gathering of community leaders, Nelessen told them, "You have been satisfied – you have been accepting – much, much less than you deserve."

Nelessen, a professor at Rutgers University and a community designer and planner who has worked all over the country, was brought here by Celebrate Billings, a partnership dedicated to improving the quality of life in the community. Nelessen first came to Billings about a year ago to energize community leaders around the idea of creating a vision for the community’s future.

This week, he was back to take that process one step further. Thursday’s gathering at Deaconess Billings Clinic brought together about 80 local government officials, business people, architects, planners, engineers, conservationists, developers and real estate agents to help create the outline of a land-use plan for the greater Billings area.

Under Nelessen’s guidance, the group spent five hours hunched over maps of the valley, deciding where growth should occur, what lands should be developed and which left undisturbed, where streets should be built or expanded, where housing should be concentrated.

They also took part in a Visual Preference Survey, a planning tool developed by Nelessen that uses photos of a city under discussion along with images from other communities to determine what kinds of development are favored by the greatest number of people.

After he and two assistants synthesized everything they learned from that session, Nelessen presented his findings to about 150 people at the Northern Hotel Friday afternoon. In slightly more than an hour, in what was part sermon, part lecture and part pep talk, Nelessen told audience members what their own community leaders envision for the future.

Much of what he said might have sounded familiar, but his rapid-fire speech, animated delivery and the breezy confidence developed over 35 years of urban planning made it seem fresh and occasionally provocative.

Nelessen said 82 percent of the community leaders surveyed Thursday said they favored some controls on the rate, type and location of further development in Billings, especially in undeveloped areas within city limits.

That survey closely matched a national survey his firm did at the behest of the National Association of Realtors, Nelessen said. It involved asking a cross-section of Americans their views on growth and development, and it showed that their top priority is building parks, open space and amenities like sidewalks and trails.

Nelessen said Thursday that parks and open spaces are so important that he would even advocate taking money away from education if that were the only way to create more green areas.

The second priority is maintaining rural land, particularly productive farmland, in its current state, followed by the need to redevelop older city neighborhoods, he said. Other priorities include revising subdivision standards and encouraging the creation of villagelike neighborhoods in new subdivisions.

To bring about change, Nelessen said, a community needs to have:

* A shared vision of growth.

* Government and business leaders who are committed to that vision.

* Support from merchants and residents and guarantees that growth plans are ecologically and fiscally viable.

* A commitment to creating high-quality, exciting building designs, green space and public amenities.

* Growth plans and policies that assure proper development.

* Logical, simple zoning codes that are based on "transects" – zoning districts that move along a continuum from undeveloped natural areas to highly urbanized city centers.

Nelessen said it is important that Billings’ vision be site-specific, not based on what has worked somewhere else.

"Because you’re in such a unique place, why do you want to look like every place else?" he asked.

In decades of conducting Visual Preference Surveys, Nelessen said, he remembers only two other times that any natural features were rated as highly as the Rims were in the survey taken Thursday. Nelessen said one obvious goal should be to preserve the Rims and the Yellowstone River from any further development.

He also said it is time for local government to put its foot down and stop subsidizing sprawl. He said building roads and water and sewer lines farther and farther out into the country is destructive of inner cities and wasteful of public money.

Flashing a photo of a dilapidated strip mall on two screens flanking the podium, Nelessen said, "Not only are you sprawling. The early sprawl is rotting."

Nelessen said building new developments along the lines supported by Billings’ civic leaders is not only a good idea, it will lead to increased value. He is calling his book "What America Wants" because Americans are no longer satisfied with sprawl and lifeless subdivisions, he said. They want old-fashioned neighborhoods and they aren’t getting them in places like Billings because developers are satisfied with what they know and see no reason to try something new.

Government can do them a favor by requiring them to build what people want, Nelessen said.

Speaking of his community planning efforts elsewhere in the country, Nelessen said Thursday, "The wealth we’ve created for some developers is obscene. The wealth we’ve created for some people who got in early on these developments is just phenomenal."

Gazette Publisher Michael Gulledge, one of the organizers of Celebrate Billings, said after Nelessen’s talk Friday that he has learned that creating new design standards is more than a matter of esthetics.

"It’s got economic development written all over it," he said.

Attorney Bill Cole, chairman of the Yellowstone County Planning Board, said the community has to get behind the kind of efforts advocated by Nelessen. One concrete step would be passing an open-space bond issue to buy property the public wants to protect, including the Rims and riverfront land, he said.

He said business people will have to play a leading role in this, particularly in establishing sign standards and design guidelines. "The reality is, government rarely leads this charge," he said.

Planning Director Ramona Mattix said Nelessen’s work could be valuable as the department proceeds with creating specific neighborhood plans throughout the city, and in upcoming efforts to revise subdivision rules and zoning regulations.

Nelessen said an important step in the process was simply getting local leaders together and allowing them to work on a common vision.

"If these folks are buying into it, it would be silly, politically, not to buy into it," he said. "This is local politics."

Ed Kemmick can be reached at 657-1293 or [email protected].

Copyright © The Billings Gazette, a division of Lee Enterprises.

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