Every 10 years, the City of Cornelia puts out a new Comprehensive Plan, and even though its current plan is only in its fifth year, the city has begun planning for the next one. While it is a requirement to update the Comprehensive Plan every five years, Cornelia has realized its plan needs to be updated for a different reason.
“We are actually designated as a PlanFirst community, which means that we have proven to our community and to the state of Georgia that we do what we say we’re going to do,” said Jessie Owensby, Downtown Development Authority Director. “In fact, we did this back in 2018 and it was supposed to be a 10-year Comprehensive Plan. … You have to update your 10-year plan every five years, just to kind of keep it going. But we actually have to update ours because we are almost finished with the projects we have listed. So, we need the community to tell us what they wanna see in our next plan implementation because if it makes it into this plan, we are going to do it.”
Because Cornelia is a PlanFirst community and has shown the community its dedication to its residents, a Comprehensive Plan survey has been implemented. The purpose of this survey is to hear from the citizens, no matter the age, to ensure the city will continue to grow in a way that residents are happy with.
“We are really trying to get citizen engagement,” Owensby said. “Look, we are public servants and public administrators work for taxpayers and the citizens of a city and a community. So, you all are our bosses and we want to do what y’all want us to do. A lot of times, public administrators do what they think is the right thing because they don’t know what the community wants because the community does not tell them. … We’re trying to plan for the future, and when I say that, I really stress young people taking this survey, because what we’re planning in 2023, we’re not planning for ourselves, we’re planning for them.”
While the PlanFirst designation is important to the city, what is more important is ensuring its citizens are happy to live in Cornelia and are proud of what their local government is doing. Implementing this survey will not only allow the city to keep the PlanFirst title, but hear back from the residents to see where they believe deserves some attention and improvement.
“We have worked really hard to make sure that we keep our PlanFirst designation and that we are engaging our citizens, that we are working for them and doing what they tell us they wanna do. We wanna be good stewards of their tax dollars, so we wanna spend our money where they tell us to spend it. … That’s, that’s how we come up with the projects, is by listening to the people who live here and who are gonna be helping to pay for it. And that’s really how government’s supposed to work, right? Well, that’s how we do it in Cornelia,” said Owensby.
The survey will be available from April 3 through May 31. Visit www.surveymonkey.com/r/QVZ9XR9 to take the survey in English, or www.surveymonkey.com/r/GXHS3M6 to take it in Spanish.