The following first appears in today's MDT under legals.

notice of workshop:
planning commissioners from the municipal planning commissions and the county planning commission in blount county have been invited to a workshop on green infrastructure planning at 6:00 pm january 26 in the gary hensley meeting room of the maryville municipal building. the workshop will not be a meeting of any of the planning commissions involved, and no formal actions will be taken.
january 26, 2009

The words no formal actions are bothersome. The purpose of this meeting can be found at the Blount County site and the following comes from the Staff Memo, Long Range Items, Dec 23.

Staff Memo, Long Range Items, Dec 23

4. Update on Green Infrastructure Planning Process and prospective dates
for future activities.

Staff has completed the first draft report on citizen comments and results from workshop mapping activities held in October. A final report is expected to be available by the first week of January after review by the other municipal partners in the process and editing of maps into final form.

A total of 84 citizens participated at 18 workshop tables in eight workshop sites. The workshop tables resulted in 18 maps on which citizens identified priority sites for green infrastructure and also 18 table reports of top three priorities. Staff received and compiled 16 sets of comments from individual citizens.

Based on previous plans for the green infrastructure planning process, the results are to be presented to the community early January. Tentative schedule is Monday, January 12 with venue to be determined.

The combined County and City Planning Commissions agreed to hold two
workshops, one in January and one in February. Both workshop meetings are
assumed to be in the evening, and should last about two-and-one-half hours. The first workshop in January will review the citizen workshop results, and conduct a similar map based workshop with Planning Commissioners as participants. The February workshop will focus on priorities and implementation strategies.

From this we learn that tonight those planning commissioners from the county and the cities will be creating their own maps. How will these maps be used? Will the results of these maps be added to the 18 maps created by citizens at those very public workshops which were held a few months ago? If so, any maps created tonight can greatly change the outcome of the citizens' selection.

To review the outcome of the previous citizens' meeting please see (link...)
"Report of Green Infrastructure Planning Workshops Held October 13 to 20, 2008"