X-Plan Update

Draft X-Plan Now Online, “Virtual Meeting” Available for Citizens to Provide Feedback

After months of community dialogue, a preliminary plan for the future of Xenia has emerged, and is now posted on the City website!

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.

A public workshop was held on July 16, 2012 to review and discuss the draft X-Plan. Now the plan is available on the City website (www.ci.xenia.oh.us) by clicking on “X-Plan,” “more,” and “Plan Documents.”

Citizens can participate in a “Virtual Meeting” using Ideascale at www.xplan.ideascale.com, between now and August 24. Citizens must register on the site and can then view a summary of the X-Plan draft. Citizens can then vote on specific plan recommendations to help the City prioritize them and provide feedback.

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 hear 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 participate in the Virtual Meeting, so you can help to set the priorities for Xenia’s future!