It may be politics as usual or it may be a relatively recent development in the function of Columbia’s city government, but we have been repeatedly disappointed this year with the failure of city leaders to properly plan and design many of its initiatives and projects with adequate input from all stakeholders and comprehensive data to work with.
Several examples from the past months have given us plenty of evidence that City Hall has a fundamental difficulty in looking out for the needs of college students — an incredibly troubling trend to be found in a college town.
City Hall recently unveiled what is intended to be the next evolution of the struggling Columbia Transit system. The new plan, dubbed “CoMo Connect,” would replace the current routes with a network system (two core routes running frequently along Columbia’s central axes with seven neighborhood loops connected to them), as soon as August 2014.
The plan is slick and modern, with many appealing advantages over Columbia Transit, but its initial development lacked one crucial element: input from students of Columbia’s three higher education institutions.
For all their talk about listening to and collaborating with students, City Council appeared ready to move forward on CoMo Connect without input from students before Fourth Ward councilman Ian Thomas raised the issue last month.
This is a troubling continuation of precedent — college students are essential to the ridership of any transit system in Columbia, particularly with the recent explosion of student housing far from campus, and should be involved in any planning from the outset, not lumped in as part of a “public input” period far after the basics of the system have been designed and set.
According to Public Works spokesman Steve Sapp, the city does intend to gather data for the transit system beginning in August. But it will only cover current ridership patterns, ostensibly to cut down on unnecessary coverage and routes.
Shouldn’t the city be working to identify what a municipal transit system _could_ be — potential riders who would benefit from having accessible transit, routes and stops to maximize that accessibility, and so on — instead of studying the trends of the current (and obviously problematic) system? Shouldn’t the city be actively reaching out to groups and demographics currently underserved by Columbia transit — MU students living far off-campus, for one — to figure out how to better serve them?
Before a dime is spent on such a major overhaul of a municipal institution, the city should ensure that every stakeholder — each person involved in and affected by the plan — is aware of what will take place and what it means to them and has had an adequate chance to help shape the plan. The CoMo Connect situation is starting to remind us of [City Council’s Providence Road Improvement project](https://www.themaneater.com/stories/2013/4/9/providence-road-pothole-confusion/), which culminated in April’s embarrassing, abysmal and all-too-avoidable cancellation after the insufficient planning of the project became inescapable. During the rescinding process that month, Fifth Ward councilwoman Laura Nauser perfectly summed up our fears about the council’s spotty groundwork skills.
“This is an issue that’s been going on for many years,” Nauser said. “I think what we have here is a prime example of Columbia, where we are always trying to go back and fix a problem we create because we didn’t plan adequately for the future.”
We are unfortunately witnessing a similar path being followed with the council’s response to this summer’s rash of shootings in Columbia. Much has been verbalized, little has been agreed upon and virtually nothing has been done by city leaders to attempt to alleviate the violence. That takes reaching out; that takes bold leadership and asking tough questions to fix the problem before it spirals out of control. At this point, we don’t have much faith that City Hall is capable of this kind of leadership.
Trial-and-error, crisis-by-crisis governing wastes time and money, inflicts headaches for everyone involved and threatens the well-being of the city and the trust of citizens in their government. For Columbia to tackle its current problems, city leaders must improve their planning skills and practices. To simply gather data and use it to justify a plan is one thing; to gather _relevant_ and focused data and use it to shape a plan is another thing entirely. We wish City Council would strive to conduct the latter instead of the former; it would greatly improve how the city is able to meet the needs and desires of its citizens.