The Brown County Redevelopment Commission is seeking a grant to develop a master plan for the county.

Tim Clark, one of the newest members of the commission, has been leading the effort to get a planning grant for around $40,000.

The county already has a comprehensive plan, adopted by county government in 2011. It outlines overall goals and general objectives for zoning and development in the county.

A master plan gets more specific, laying out specific actions to achieve those desired results.

A master plan is more than one or two ideas for the future, said John Dockrey, the director of business development at MartinRiley, an engineering and architectural firm.

That group met with the RDC Jan. 27 to discuss possibly contracting with the county to develop a master plan.

Problems such as a shortage of housing, lack of broadband internet and need for additional sewer service need to be addressed as portions of a larger problem. “It’s a kind of all-or-nothing thing,” Dockrey said.

Why plan?

Clark is a newcomer to the county redevelopment commission.He got involved in local government as a result of the school funding referendum debate during the last election. When he started asking questions about the referendum, he came across data on declining school enrollment in Brown County. When he asked what the plan was to reverse the trend, he didn’t find any plans, he said.

With a background in quality management in the civilian world and work in intelligence in the Army Reserve, Clark likes to see numbers.

He has taken a strong interest in Community Performance Indicators, benchmarks that show whether a community is declining or improving.

“The start for me was the CPIs,” he said. “People told me that the state has these indicators for a healthy community — ‘Well, great, has anybody done that?’ No.”

So, Clark gathered the information needed to evaluate changes in per capita income, population growth, school enrollment, assessed property value and educational attainment rate — changes in the highest level of education people have received.

The results of the numbers he compiled show several indicators of decline for Brown County: a shrinking tax base, rising costs for government, assessed values that are outpaced by inflation, a median income that is increasing but below the 1999 peak, and a generally declining percentage of the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Increases to taxes can create government surpluses, but if the tax base continues to decrease as costs increase, that surplus is soon lost, he said.

“Step one is, ‘What are the facts?’” he said. “At that point, you look at the facts and say, ‘Is that a problem?’”

Whatever happens, it needs to be driven by the community and developed through consensus, Clark said. As part of his research, he has compiled a number of studies, surveys and reports done over the years.

While some, such as the Vision 2010 project led by the League of Women Voters, led to big ideas coming to fruition, such as the Brown County Library and YMCA being built, other efforts have sat on a shelf with little or no action.

The key is making sure whatever is recommended will work for the community and will have their support, he said.

“That’s how you prevent the ‘shelfware’ plans,” he said.

What may come

In response to an inquiry from Clark, graduate students at Indiana University are working on a model for managing county government finances in response to rising costs and declining revenue, Clark said.“I was thrilled that they took that on. It’s something they can leverage not only for us, but statewide,” he said.

“It’s just trying to understand the problem,” Clark said. “If we keep doing what we’re doing, what’s that projection?”

He’s asked the students to see if they can project when the next point will be when taxes would have to be increased if other factors don’t change, Clark said.

“It seems like, when I go to the meetings, you look at the yearly budget,” he said. “Well, what’s happening year two, year three — where’s your five-year budget?”

Dockrey is part of a group known as Revitalination, which also brings together Sesco Environmental Solutions, the University of Southern Indiana and Banning Engineering.

It’s important to have a plan that stands out from the boilerplate that some communities may be tempted to go with, Dockrey said. The community needs to show a reason by people should invest in it.

“What are you going to do different from everybody else?” he said.

To develop a master plan, Dockrey advised reaching out to real estate agents to talk about housing, looking at development without emphasizing the town/county borders, and treating the school corporation as an equal partner.

“From the outside looking in, Brown County and Nashville are synonymous,” he said.

“We’ve got this catchphrase that ‘We own quality of life,’” said RDC President Dave Redding.

A key part of that is the quality of the school system, and the RDC has been working closely with Superintendent Laura Hammack to bring more educational opportunities into the county, he said.

Dockrey said people who have been part of past “shelfware” plans should be brought in as well, and Redding said he wants to explore ways to draw people into community planning discussions who may not seek them out otherwise.

“We don’t give value to the people who have ‘checked out,’” Dockrey said. “There is a whole group of people whose heart is in this community.”

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A Community Performance Indicators presentation, prepared by Brown County Redevelopment Commission member Tim Clark, can be found at choosebrowncounty.com/work/rdc-document-resources.

On the same page you can read various Brown County studies, surveys and reports dating back to the 2007 Needs and Assets Assessment.

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