Collaborative Planning: Evaluating School Siting Methods In Mecklenburg County, North Carolina

For many planners, Oregon's statewide growth manage ment policy framework represents the planning ideal. The planning regime in Oregon requires local comprehensive planning that is coordinated and enforced at the regional and state level. As mandated by state law, comprehensive plans are required for all cities, counties and regional areas. These comprehensive plans include both a coordinated land use map and a policy statement of the governing body, and serve to interrelate all functional and natural systems and activities relating to the use of land including: sewer, water, transportation, education, recreation, natural resources and air and water quality (APA, 1996). States such as Oregon have the political will to enact a highly specific framework for managing a complex web of planning issues. Working within a growth management framework that acknowledges connections and requires coordination from the state level down to local communities is deemed by many as an ideal planning paradigm. So how do communities in states that don't have growth management frameworks coordinate land use planning activities inter-jurisdictionally? If they do it at all, they do it voluntarily. And often this voluntary collaboration between governmental entities lacks the sophistication and logical organization that a well-defined growth management framework includes. Even though these ad hoc collaborative planning regimes may be well defined as bricolage (Innes and Booher, 1999), they are often successful at coordinating local and regional collaborative planning efforts whe n no such effort is mandated or incentivized. As stated by Lindell L, Marsh in his vignette entitled Collaborative Planning: A New Paradigm for Reconciling Urban Growth and Conservation, "The promise of such an approach extends in many directions. It overcomes the nation's historic institutional fragmentation. It is based on the collaboration of interests and shared leadership. Together, stakeholders formulate a plan, a kind of social contract that reconciles the variety of interests. The process has much in common with ideas such as "partnering," public/private partnerships, 'horizontal management,' and 'management by principle' that now pervade our culture. The breadth and power of this approach can be expected to extend to broad growth management is sues such as central city/suburban conflicts and regional economic development strategies" (1997). Collaborative planning has proven to be an ideal approach for a multitude of issues. Like many metropolitan communities, elected officials in the Charlotte metropolitan region of North Carolina have responded to issues impacting their region by institutionalizing several vehicles for inter-jurisdictional collaboration and coordination. This study explores the ad hoc collaborative planning efforts that have been undertaken in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg region, in an effort to create regional consensus on the provision and development of schools. The paper also presents a theoretical model for evaluating collaborative planning; evaluates the collaborative planning efforts undertaken in the Charlotte region using the theoretical framework, and makes recommendations for strengthening these efforts.Master of City and Regional Plannin