Preliminary X-Plan Draft Ready for Citizen Review at Public Workshop and Virtual Meeting

After a six-month community dialogue among Xenia citizens and City officials, a preliminary plan for the future of Xenia has emerged!

Xenia residents and business owners provided the City with highly constructive input through public meetings, online discussion, a phone survey, and even a high school class project. Now is the time for Xenians to view a plan that was built around that input, and let the City know whether we are headed in the right direction.

Xenians are invited to attend the fourth X-Plan Public Workshop on Monday, July 16, to be held in the Media Room of the Greene County Job and Family Services Building, 541 Ledbetter Road, from 6:30 to 8:30 PM. You will have a chance to view the preliminary X-Plan strategies and policies, ask questions and let City staff know whether anything needs to be changed, added or deleted.

In case you can’t make the workshop, the X-Plan draft will be posted on the City’s website after the July 16 workshop (www.ci.xenia.oh.us, click “X-Plan,” “More,” and then “Plan Documents”). The City will also post a summary of the draft on a “Virtual Meeting” website after the workshop using the Ideascale platform. Citizens will be able to access the website, vote on priorities and suggest changes between July 23 and August 23.

After receiving feedback, the City’s project team will revise the plan as needed and then present a detailed action plan to the public in the fall. At that point, citizens and City leaders will review and prioritize specific steps needed to implement X-Plan. Since resources are limited, it will be critical to decide which items can move forward immediately, which items will require partnerships with non-City entities, and which items must be long-term goals.

As you may remember, X-Plan is a vision for future development and community improvement in Xenia, and a roadmap of how to achieve the vision. It will guide future decisions by City leaders to allocate resources, pursue grants, review development proposals, and maintain/improve infrastructure.

The draft plan is organized around four primary goals that the City heard from Xenians during the community input process:

• Grow our economy (recruit new businesses, help existing businesses grow, partner with universities, make City government a business advocate, etc.)
• Be a community of choice (improve amenities like parks/recreation/retail, encourage high-quality development, market Xenia, create community-oriented bike paths, increase community partnerships, etc.)
• Make Xenia’s neighborhoods great (maintain healthy neighborhoods while revitalizing declining ones; strategies based on neighborhood-specific conditions)
• Revitalize our core (attract investment to downtown and older neighborhoods, adaptively reuse older buildings, retain downtown institutions, redevelop underutilized properties, improve pedestrian and bike movement, capitalize on bike paths)

There is also a fifth element, Regulatory Framework, which will provide policies to guide future development, zoning, annexation, and transportation decisions, consistent with the four goals identified above.

The plan is merely a draft at this stage and is subject to change, based on the input we here from Xenia citizens and leaders. Those interested in receiving updates about X-Plan can sign up for the X-Plan email list by sending an email to xplan@ci.xenia.oh.us (enter "xplan" as the subject; no message content needed).

Please attend the July 16 meeting and/or participate in the Virtual Meeting, so you can help to set the priorities for Xenia’s future!