One of my FOIA requests to the Town of Christiansburg included all Meeting Minutes where the Comprehensive Plan was discussed and the citizen input data that was used to determine what the citizens of Christiansburg wanted to see in the future of the Town.
Upon looking through that information, I found a few things that made me want to know more.
- Why was I provided draft copies of many of the documents instead of the official signed copies when I asked for official copies?
- What role did Dr. Zahm and her students from Virginia Tech really play in obtaining citizen input for the Christiansburg Comprehensive Plan?
- Why was the number of people who provided citizen input to Christiansburg EXACTLY the same as those for Montgomery County’s Comprehensive Plan Citizen Input data?
Re: 1) Digging a little further, I found that many of the minutes remain untyped and unsigned (although I think that is being worked on). I am concerned that FOIA was violated when the official documents were not provided.
Re: 2) Dr. Zahm did not seem to know what I was talking about in reference to the Town’s Comprehensive Plan. There had been some discussion but nothing was ever formally done by her or her students. They did work closely with Montgomery County in getting citizen input for their Comprehensive Plan.
Re: 3) Since I happen to have been the person noted in the acknowledgements section of the Montgomery County’s Comprehensive Plan as the person who input and analyzed all of their data, I can state that the data are so similar as to be identical. If the Town used this data as the basis for their citizen input, they did not take into account that only 201 of those 1347 responses came from adult citizens of the Town of Christiansburg. This would mean that 1146 people from outside of the Town of Christiansburg contributed to what citizens in the town wanted to see and not to see as far as services, growth, etc. I hope not! Since the town only provided summary data rather than actual forms used to obtain that data, and I have only found 2 people in town who remember seeing some kind of citizen survey form, it is hard to tell where the data really came from. Several people have reported participating in the County’s meetings and supplying information to the County.
Montgomery County did offer to make the data they had available to the Town but the Town did not accept that offer of the raw data which would have allowed someone to pull out and use only the data provided by Town residents. Again, I know this because I had to set up the analysis program to allow for sorting by groups as to whether they lived in County, Radford, Blacksburg, or Christianburg.
I am sure that, as I continue to review records, I will find other things to write about here. However, these few issues have given me more than enough to think about for now. I still have that data on my computer. Maybe I need to pull out only the Christiansburg responses and see if those responses match with the Comprehensive Plan.
Have a great day!
And do not forget to vote!!!
