City of Brownwood engineers are working alongside Texas A&M graduate students in an effort to update the “Master Plan” of Brownwood. This plan is used to develop a new long-range comprehensive plan in economic, transportation, flood plain and environmental aspects for planning the growth and expansion of Brownwood as a municipality.
About 15 Texas A&M graduate students from the College of Architecture’s Urban Planning class are collaborating to help the City of Brownwood and seeking public input in order to know what is working and what the public desires in the city in order to make future plans that benefit everyone.
In fact, this input has come in the form of a public survey, which can be found at City Hall, the library, and at the Chamber of Commerce, or online at the following websites:
Participation of Brownwood residents is vital in helping move the city in the right direction over the next 20 years through this plan. Participation is voluntary, and the survey should take about 10 minutes to complete. Respondents must be 18 or older.
Friday afternoon a portion of this class visited Brownwood to gather data from areas such as the industrial park, flood plain areas (current and future areas), residential areas, parks, and the wetland near Wal-Mart. A note of how Brownwood sits within what some call a “crater”, with bluffs on the east and west sides of the city. The different elevations of the city cause the more probable areas of growth to be near the north and south sides, due to degrees of difficulty in development. They also collected information on schools, Brownwood ISD and the local colleges & university.
The group visiting Brownwood Friday consisted of Allen Kumassah, who is a student from Ghana and is interested in zoning and planning along with environmental issues; Travis Young, originally from West Virginia, who is interested in hazardous material mitigation and disaster planning; and Danyu Shi, a student from China who is interested in transportation planning. With these special interests, the collaboration has a diverse group of opinions and ideas to help us get a more well rounded plan.
“With the data and maps, it is easy to get back logged in work, but now we are waiting on public input to know opinions,” stated Young. Seeing the city helps the group to better understand what they have seen in hard copy data.
“I’m just glad they are here to see it first hand,” stated Jodie Kelley City of Brownwood Engineer. “We want to know concerns and where the city needs improvement, so we can incorporate into the plan what in the city that people like and what we need to be doing.”
This survey is very important and the public is urged to complete it. Out of the total population of Brownwood, only 140 surveys had been completed as of Thursday. The students along with city officials are hoping many more will be completed by the November 15th deadline.
Pictured above are: (Left to Right) Allen Kumassah, Travis Young, and Danyu Shi.
