The Phoenix Futures Forum

Recommendations by task force subject areas

Community

Develop, implement and oversee a good neighbor network throughout Phoenix to invite, involve, inform and empower every citizen to take part in concerns affecting family, neighborhood and community.

Complete development of and implement a school-based information network for each neighborhood.

Develop and use logos, signs and other identification in neighborhoods, communities and villages.

Find ways to resolve liability insurance and other problems which would allow groups to use schools for community purposes.

Initiate a program to identify neighborhoods and communities and to enhance their identity.

Governance

Enhance citizen participation and decentralization through a major refinement and redefinition of the village concept, providing for the election of village committee members through a town hall process, and local management of selected services.

Use local schools as focal points for neighborhoods and communities.

Create a system of self governance which facilitates the making and implementation of decisions at the most appropriate level.

Develop a rational plan for how functions and responsibilities should be shared by different groups within the City: neighborhood, community, village and city.

Develop a "town hall" or similar method of electing members of village planning committees and other village or community "representatives".

Reassess the roles and composition of standing and permanent boards, commissions and committees.

Reassess and adjust the size and configuration of villages to achieve sound, stable and recognizable boundaries and the highest levels of public identification and participation. Reinforce the identity of villages by gradually bringing the boundaries of school, public safety and other service areas into conformance with village boundaries.

Establish "Village Squares" to provide public gathering places and to accommodate certain public services in each village.

Assist in the formation and registration of neighborhood and homeowner's associations.

Create an office of Neighborhood Services Coordinator to provide information and assistance with regard to city programs and services.

Support the development of a county/regional plan and/or government which can meet the need for a structure to resolve regional issues.

Create a written Code of Ethics, Conduct and Standards to apply to all public officials, citizen volunteers and professionals involved in governance at every level. Create an ethics review board to enforce it.

Create a Citizen's Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

Adopt guidelines for lobbying based in part on applicable provisions of Arizona law.

Use a newspaper page of standard location and design and regular publication for public notices, announcements, meeting results and schedules, etc.

Create "posting" kiosks in a number of prominent public locations. Expand computer access to public meeting notices and other public reports and information, including provision of terminals in public libraries, village squares.

Provide cumulative voting and attendance records of official meetings of key boards and commissions and the City Council and outcomes within 48 hours of voting on zoning, planning and key decisions.

Redesign notification signs for legibility of key information from traveling autos, provide more information, color code by purpose and post no less than 1/4 mile from site.

Establish a system of registration to allow interested organizations and parties to receive official notifications of interest on a routine basis.

Implement "District Forum" type meetings at the village level.

Apply professional skills in the conduct of public meetings, including the use of facilitators and mediators.

Involve youth in boards and commissions and in employment in public/nonprofit service to aid committees, the Council and other groups. Create a standing committee of students to liaison between the City and schools.

Provide options of "no confidence" and "none of the above" on ballots for public office.

Use language in bond elections which precisely defines proposed use of funds, and require authorization to expire if funds cannot be used for purposes approved.

Use ballot for selective polling of views on major policies, projects, etc.

Conduct a full review of the City of Phoenix Charter, including enforcement provisions for its powers.

Adopt provisions which discourage the parcel by parcel amendment of the General Plan.

Develop and apply a broad citizen participation process in update of the General Plan which includes a strong role for established village, community and neighborhood organizations.

Simplify governmental departments, combining areas which serve (or could serve) similar missions.

Enhance and restructure local revenue sources, including reducing excessive reliance on sales taxes.

Continue to implement the concept of "the cost causer should be the cost payer" by linking revenue sources to programs and services provided.

Develop ways to coordinate and combine use of public and community buildings and facilities, such as schools, parks, libraries, fire and police stations, drainage ways, flood storage, etc.

Economy, Technology and Education

Provide basic skills education and appropriate job training from early childhood throughout the working years.

Provide a working environment which is sensitive to family needs.

Generate an analysis and description of the current structure of the economy, including identification of its strong and weak sectors. Identify industries which should be targeted for encouragement and development in the region.

Establish a world-leading, independent Learning Research Institute in Phoenix to create innovative learning methods and tools for all learning environments, become major center for business education, disseminate research results and teaching services through an innovative entrepreneurial organization, and generate spin-off economic activity.

Develop incentives to encourage companies to provide family support programs to employees such as: child care, flexible work hours, job training, elderly care, parental leave, school/civic time off, transportation alternatives, and work location flexibility.

Over many years, bring schools together with social services and other city services (including police and fire stations, libraries and park facilities), so that each neighborhood will have a strong focal point for education, recreation, social services, career opportunity observation and role model influence.

Environment and Natural Resources

Protect and expand the mountain preserves and protect and improve natural drainage ways.

Increase the use of desert plants and wild flowers. Provide educational/informational materials/workshops on benefits and use of desert landscape materials. Use desert landscape materials in public projects, except for historic restorations.

Establish regulations for mining to preserve/restore habitat.

Establish protected view corridors. Discourage sprawl and preserve natural desert in and around the region. Establish "Desert Belts" and develop regulations, fee systems, management practices and other measures to protect from abuse and inappropriate development. Establish "desert wildlife parks" in key locations.

Expand the curbside recycling program citywide.

Establish a program for safe collection of household hazardous wastes.

Provide incentives to install low-flow plumbing and to install low water use landscapes. Retrofit 100,000 existing housing units to meet 1980 plumbing code. Retrofit public buildings.

Ban decorative lakes except in intensive public use areas. Require new large turf areas (including golf courses) to use recycled water.

Pursue legislation which will lessen the pressures for municipalities to annex land, including legislation for sales tax revenue sharing.

Restructure Planning Commission to provide for village representation. Change the Commission's function from approving site-specific plans to reviewing plans for their concurrence and integration with and their effect on the General Plan.

Foster neighborhood identities by creating a neighborhood information and support office.

Transportation & Communication

Reduce the negative impacts and demands of transportation on the limited resources of users and of the community by giving priority to investments which support infill and the efficient use of land, and by avoiding those which generate premature costs or which detract from the value of existing development. Maintain a transportation system which separates pedestrians and cyclists from automobile traffic, and separates local from through traffic. Make drivers' education mandatory for new drivers. Provide a balance of transportation modes scaled to serve various travel distances and speeds. These must include facilities distinctly designed to serve pedestrian, cycling and transit movement and the separation of short and long distance travel, with more emphasis on short distance movement. Improve capabilities for electronic communication as an alternative to travel and delivery.

Provide noise and landscape buffers along every new and widened traffic artery or freeway. Use dead-ends, one-way streets and other measures to protect residential areas from traffic from adjacent land use areas.

Require the replacement of affordable housing displaced by commercial or other construction as condition of project approval.

Transform the Salt River into a chain of lakes and ponds formed by levees in the riverbed system, with extensive planting of native cottonwoods, sycamores, palo verde, and other trees. Preserve and restore indigenous patterns of natural vegetation.

Transform canal network into accessible greenbelts, with abundant shade.

Implement neighborhood through-traffic restrictions and impediments.

Implement a comprehensive bicycle network. Design streets for safety of pedestrians and bicycles.

Combine cycling and transit by providing cycling access to transit, bicycle storage facilities at terminals and carriage of cycles on transit.

Preserve and enhance local retail opportunities on minor arterials.

Continue to implement left turn arrows and other measures to implement safe intermediate travel.

Expand Sky Harbor Airport to continue to serve as the Regional Airport until at least 2015.

Provide an advanced electronic infrastructure to link community colleges, ASU, governmental services, schools, libraries, homes and businesses. Provide access to electronic communications at community locations such as libraries and schools.

Develop and manage local streets to limit their use to low speed travel, property access and local circulation. Develop principles and standards for and manage collector streets to serve as circulators and access routes within local areas. Develop and manage minor arterial routes to give preference to medium distance trips within urban villages and communities and to serve local commercial needs. Develop principles and standards for a new classification of streets known as minor arterials. Develop and manage major arterial system to provide circulation between villages giving preference to high speed, inter-urban village trips. Define major arterial system within each village or subregional community and develop appropriate design and management standards.

Enable all persons, regardless of physical limitations to use public transportation. Continue to implement national standards for transit access.

Urban Form

Build a city with an urban identity which appropriately optimizes the physical assets of its Sonoran desert setting and history.

Develop a master plan which will give greater emphasis to the use of the canals as open space and as a focus for development.

Create a hierarchy in the grid street system and differentiate the design to reflect their intended use and their environments.

Preserve and restore the ecology of desert rivers, arroyos and washes, including the Salt River.

Build a city enriched by a diversity of coherent neighborhoods. Define and prepare plans for the preservation and improvement of all "character" districts (such as Encanto, Coronado,), existing and prospective.

Emphasize plans for streetscape and landscape, as principal character givers.

Identify distinctive characteristics of each district as theme for development.

Develop transportation plans which decrease reliance on the auto (and emphasize cycling and walking) within villages and which enhance connections between cores.

Strengthen roles of village planning committees through representation on city-wide planning groups and through delegation of land use planning or review functions.

Give each neighborhood access to logistical and staff support needed to create a neighborhood organization and to assist in planning.

Prepare plans which divert auto traffic from residential areas and create cycling and pedestrian systems within neighborhoods.

Revise and refine the urban village concept, to include communities and neighborhoods, and define appropriate relationships of transportation systems to land use within these concepts.

Place limits on visual pollution in zoning and design review guidelines. Develop stronger standards on signage and develop technique/program to eliminate signs and/or make existing signs conform to standards.

Establish the concept of a landscape gradient and design standards which will help create and preserve areas of different landscape quality, provide shade and meet environmental objectives.

Create demonstration and research projects (eg: at Botanical Garden and elsewhere) to evaluate and provide information about different landscape environments.

Develop a plan, standards and a program which provide shade for pedestrians at all key locations (such as transit waiting areas and major street corners), provides drinking water in key locations, provides "soft" and "cool" walking surfaces, separates pedestrians from traffic, and especially protects pedestrians at street crossings.

Develop standards to minimize areas of pavement exposed to summer sun, provide shade for all pedestrian areas, reduce pedestrian walking distances, reduce glare to buildings from pavements, etc.

Develop prototype plan for a mix of park, entertainment, local shopping, education and governmental activities to serve as "town squares".

Develop prototype concepts for the management of mixed use areas to maintain and assure that mixed-use objectives are achieved, including possibly the creation of "district associations".

Arts, Culture and Recreation

Organize major programs to promote arts, cultural and recreation activities, and to integrate them into daily life. Provide more art programs to children in schools and festivals. Create a richer variety of public art, including streetscapes, public places, schools and workplaces. Create art routes. Promote lunch hour musical and dramatic events in public places. Special efforts should be made to assist children, the aged and the handicapped in accessing programs. Develop Phoenix's outdoor environment as a distinctive theme for living, recreation and visual enjoyment, including canal banks, the Salt River bed and other streams, the Indian School property and mountain preserve areas. Expand the Percent for Arts program to 1% of public capital expenditures.

Maintain programs which encourage preservation of historic and cultural sites and districts.

Expand and integrate arts and cultural programs and activities into education at every level. Coordinate arts activities with schools to encourage student involvement and a broad interchange of programs and resources.

Develop a directory and exchange of arts, artists and arts support services. Provide prominent directional and identification signs of Arts District(s) and major arts facilities.

Provide periodic "arts/cultural" tours to familiarize community leaders and general public with facilities and programs.

Organize public participation activities to stimulate involvement and support of arts/culture programs, such as walking tours and special historic recognition days.

Establish a multipurpose arts/cultural center in the old main library to serve as a focal point for the full range of arts/cultural organizations, along with exhibit, performance and other facilities.

Restore and expand the Pueblo Grande; support development of the Phoenix Museum of History and a Science Museum.

Protect and expand the Mountain Preserves as a part of the unique character of Phoenix.

Reclaim and use canal banks for recreational .

Develop a comprehensive regional trail system for hiking, cycling and equestrian use.

Develop the full recreational potential of the Deck Park and the Indian School property.

Coordinate with schools to provide special lessons/classes to coincide with special events celebrating our ethnicity and cultural heritage.

Basic Human Needs (and Neighborhoods)

Over time, develop urban villages as clusters of neighborhoods centered on village squares where shopping, education and social opportunities are available within walking or cycling distance, or by village-scaled transit.

Fair share housing goals should be adopted for each urban village and integrated into planning and zoning decisions to begin the economic desegregation of the city.

Programs like Head Start and after school recreation programs should be expanded to better serve at-risk neighborhoods.

Initiate a major program of neighborhood stabilization and improvement in areas which have deteriorated by proactively assisting in the creation of neighborhood organizations, by expediting the enforcement of the Neighborhood Maintenance Ordinance and recruiting groups to remove litter and graffiti.

Reduce drop-out rates and crime through a "Phoenix Dreams" program which will help each economically "at-risk" child identify and nurture areas of special aptitudes and interest, and which will guarantee mentorship and a community college education if certain standards of conduct and effort are met,

Revise the General Plan to create neighborhoods and communities scaled for living.

Develop and apply the concept of the "town square" to provide a focal point for neighborhood and community life.

Encourage the preservation and development of single-room occupancy urban hotels for low income and retired people.

Require large-scale residential developments to meet a portion of the low-income housing needs of the community.

Revise the zoning code to require the replacement of housing units removed with changes in land use or illegally destroyed.

Amend the City Charter to provide the ability to make and implement appropriate decisions at neighborhood, community and village levels.

Encourage smaller-scaled retailing close to homes and employment.

Encourage local production and processing of food for local consumption.

Encourage the location of job and related training opportunities close to home in village cores and town squares.

Recommend and help to oversee a detailed policy for Council adoption in support of neighborhoods. Provide technical assistance to neighborhood associations.

Institute a Local Heroes Program: recognize and honor projects and people who have made significant contributions to the stabilization and improvement of neighborhoods.

Examine zoning, subdivision and building codes and make recommendations for changes which will eliminate unnecessary costs involved in providing housing.

Develop ways to provide community college and other learning programs in village cores.

Help develop programs to achieve better integration of neighborhood life by using schools as centers for delivery of social services, recreation, youth counseling and other community activities.

Develop programs which will help bring various generations together in recreational and related activity.

Develop ways to achieve a greater presence of police officers in areas where they are needed through bicycle, equestrian and similar patrols, the residence of officers in areas where they work, "store front" offices and stations, and similar means.

Develop "grandparenting" programs to utilize senior citizens in neighborhood and community teaching programs.