Bringing together residents, businesses and other community partners to develop long-range plans to make the Region a better place landed statewide honors for the Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission.
The Indiana Metropolitan Planning Organization Council presented NIRPC with the Outstanding Public Involvement Award for its work related to the NWI 2050 plan and Engage NWI, both are plans for Northwest Indiana that utilized surveys, workshops and public input events to get feed back to work into the respective plans. NIRPC received the award the council’s recent annual conference in Fort Wayne.
“The traditional public meeting, where we ask people to come to us, has not been very helpful for getting a true variety of perspectives,” said Ty Warner, NIRPC’s executive director. “Instead, NIRPC staff developed a fun and interactive way of engaging the Region’s residents by going to events across Northwestern Indiana where people already (were).”
NWI 2050 is the long-range plan for Lake, Porter, and LaPorte Counties and was adopted in May. Engage NWI is NIRPC’s plan for public participation, serving as a guide to enable the public to engage with regional planning and was adopted in August.
