Williamsburg’s Future Festivals have returned.
The events include seven outings across two weeks, and are a way to gather community input for updates to documents that guide the city’s long term vision. There’s also an online survey component, for those who can’t make it to one of the festivals.
WHRO spoke with Mayor Doug Pons about what residents can expect.
This interview was edited for time and clarity.
NICK MCNAMARA: So, tell me what the Future Festivals are and what they do for Williamsburg?
DOUG PONS: The city has been undertaking the goals, initiatives and outcome process, GIO process, for decades now. In the past, we would just hold a series of work sessions and open forums at city council meetings. You know, we would hear from 10-15-20 people. And while we appreciated that, we knew that there were a lot of people that weren't communicating with us through this process, so we wanted to find a way that we could go meet people where they're at.
Thus began the Future Festivals. And we take that festival to six or seven places around the city at different times and invite the public to come and participate in these festival-like games, so that they can take part of the process and give their feedback. And the games are designed to elicit different responses to various questions, like education, traffic, safety, any number of things.
NM: What’s the purpose or value of the game-like atmosphere you described at the Future Festivals?
DP: What the games do is it just inspires people to be more free-thinking, enjoy the process. It gets them to participate. You know, we all get online surveys and we all, begrudgingly, sometimes fill them out – or we don't. And so bringing people out to these festivals and having them participate in games provides an element of fun. You know, they would go spin the wheel and put their dot on various things and drop golf balls down tubes to kind of show us where people's interests lie and how much they lie in certain areas versus others.
And not only that, we provide food and beverages at no charge to the community, so it becomes more like a community picnic atmosphere.
NM: How do city staff and the council go about condensing all the input you get at the festivals into clear and actionable goals?
DP: It is a lot of work, there's no question about it.
Once all that information is gathered, staff will begin to put their findings onto paper to say ‘Here are how the different categories ranked amongst the overall categories, how the subcategories ranked in the various different categories,’ – kind of develop that graph, if you will, for each of the different festival stations.
Once we have that information, council will have a work session to begin looking at the information, having a conversation about what we're seeing in this information, (and) give feedback back to the staff members who will then start to develop that plan, if you will. Once they come back, they'll draft the plan based on the input from the survey, based on the input from council members, and begin to develop a draft. Then council will review that draft and ultimately begin to share that with the public so that they can have further input before we approve that final GIO work plan for the next two years.
That should conclude sometime in November (t0) December, I think. It's a lot of work that we've got to do in a short time. We'll ultimately have a state of the city (address) in January where we'll kind of unbold the GIO process for the next two years.
NM: There’s seven festival dates, and some have already passed, but what is your hope for community turn-out?
DP: Last year, we had some 1700 people participate in the festivals physically, but then also in the online surveys that we put out. My goal certainly would be to surpass the 1700 people by at least another 20%.
If we can get even more people to show and participate, and even on the online portal, the better informed we are. And the better informed we are, I think the residents should feel better that even though their position on something is contrary to the majority, at least the majority has had the opportunity to speak.
