Cashiers community on its way towards organizing an historic effort to shape a growth plan
Coalition brings planning: May 1 meeting to shape agenda for upcoming charette in Cashiers, North Carolina.
By:Ben Brown, For the Chronicle
The Cashiers community is on its way towards organizing an historic effort to shape a growth plan for future decades.
On April 23, a standing-room-only crowd met in the crossroads building owned by developers Marvin and Helene Gralnick to talk about next steps in preparing for an intensive three-day workshop called a "charrette." The workshop's purpose is to create a consensus-based strategy for planning Cashiers' future in harmony with its unique village character. The Cashiers charrette will be held May 14-16 at the Gralnick crossroads building. The next step is to plan the agenda for those three days.
The core group that met on April 23 will expand to a community-wide gathering on May 1, also at the Gralnick facility.
"Everyone's invited," says Ann McKee Austin, one of the organizers of the planning effort. "We're going to talk about goals we want to set for our three-day workshop when we have some of the nation's best design consultants here to listen to our ideas and help us test planning approaches."
The Cashiers event is actually a charrette-within-a-charrette. From May 13 to May 20 at Western Carolina University, the Mountain Landscapes Initiative (MLI) will stage a regional workshop to create a "Tool Box" of guidelines for responsible planning and development in North Carolina's seven western-most counties.
That MLI umbrella effort is a partnership between The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina, an Asheville-based non-profit that facilitates funding for community projects, and the Southwestern Commission, a Council of Governments organizations serving the governments of the seven western counties.
For more information about the background of the Mountain Landscapes Initiative, visit the Web page at http://www.mountainlandscapesnc.org/.
A broad-based coalition of Cashiers property owners, local non-profits, and business people nominated Cashiers for its own MLI satellite charrette and raised funding to guarantee that experts from the MLI-contracted consulting team would work on-site in Cashiers and focus on community-specific goals. Included in that planning group: Cashiers Village LLC (Raven Cliff), Marvin and Helene Gralnick, Peter Paul, Harris Development Group, Landmark Realty, the Cashiers Community Fund, the Village Green, and the Cashiers Historical Society.
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