After a weekend of public voting that attracted more than 500 community members, Evanston150 unveiled its top 30 ideas for the city’s future Thursday morning.
The newest batch of prosposals – ranging from offering free citywide WiFi to providing universal preschool for all – comes after seven voting sessions throughout the city Saturday and Sunday. At those 45-minute events, hundreds of attendees were invited to narrow down 100 ideas curated by the 21-member volunteer selection jury earlier this year.
Project Director Stephanie Kulke said she was “definitely pleased” with both the overall turnout and idea content at the public votes.
“They found it a really unique process that they could have a voice in the future of their city,” she said of participants’ enthusiasm.
But Kulke and other members of the Evanston150 steering committee agreed the most rewarding aspect of the weekend was the personal level at which community discussion unraveled.
“Groups gathering together – that’s fundamental to this whole process,” Kulke said. “You couldn’t just pick your top two or three ideas. You had to sit there and go through all 100 ideas. It was a lot more participatory.”
Carolyn Dellutri, executive director of Downtown Evanston and a steering committee member, echoed Kulke’s emphasis on the value of in-person voting. She recalled “packed” and “very lively” audiences at the voting venues she oversaw, factors that only added to the cordial atmosphere.
“The whole idea was to bring people out to get them to talk together,” Dellutri said. “Let’s face it – moving forward, it’s not going to be over the Internet. We’re going to have to sit down at a table and find ways for these idea to come to life.”
And now the selection jury faces that exact task: Further shaving the 30 ideas to 10 final proposals for community presentation Nov. 10 at the Levy Senior Center, 300 Dodge Ave.
According to a news release issued Thursday by Evanston150, those final 10 ideas will be evaluated for their “potential for long-term impact, and specific, actionable and measurable results.”
Steering committee members on Thursday admitted meeting that set criteria may prove difficult with some of the more abstract goals voted on over the weekend, such as becoming the greenest city in the United States and making Evanston an award-winning walkable city. But they deferred those judgment calls to the selection jury members, who have chosen to remain anonymous until next month.
“At this phase, they’re not supposed to think about feasibility,” Kulke said of the juror’s deliberations. “The community will figure out some way to implement them.”
University spokesperson and steering committee member Al Cubbage added some ideas can be “easily combined” and folded into more explicit suggestions. Nonetheless, he said he was eager to see what the selection jury comes up with for the Nov. 10 announcement event.
Cubbage, the only University official on the steering committee, was less gung-ho about NU student involvement in the voting sessions.
“Yes, I was very pleased (with the turnout),” he said. “No, I did not see a lot of students.”
On the contrary, Kulke recalled encountering plenty of off-campus residents, including one who called her Saturday morning and asked if she could “just come and observe.”
Kulke was quick to correct the seeming misconception about student eligibility.
“And I was like, ‘You can vote,'” Kulke recalled. “‘You are a student, and that counts, too.'”
