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Lets Talk Annapolis is an engaging and elevating community-wide conversation carried on within small, comfortable discussion groups. Intended to discover the central concepts of “quality of life” in our City – even though the term means something slightly different to each of us – it is a process for community self-determination that will help inform local government planners and policymakers.
We’ll identify the elements of our city that we cherish and suggest improvements for those we do not. We’ll discuss ideas for creating community within our incredibly varied population and discovering shared purposes, and in doing so we’ll move beyond our insulated workplaces, iPods, and neighborhoods into the wholeness of the city we call home.
We’ll talk openly and honestly – not with complaints or criticism – and we’ll try to rediscover our common ground to regain our City’s culture of connection, and advance our collective wisdom.
We begin this social communication at a moment of opportunity to shape the vision for Annapolis through 2018. Our ongoing conversation will first help inform those who will go on to participate in our 10-year Comprehensive Plan.
The City’s last Comprehensive Plan was designed more than a decade ago by citizens who tackled the issues before them with an optimistic spirit and recognition that their voice and perspectives were important to the vibrancy of the City.
They were faced with vacant land and derelict buildings, and it was their notion to infill available spaces with residences and retail in order to diminish dependence on cars for daily shopping. It was also their mandate, which ensured that community associations and neighborhoods would be partners with developers in the design of the new urban environment.
For some, the construction all around us is unsettling, but looking back, would we have chosen differently?
There are those who contend that talk is cheap. But talk is the most valuable currency we humans exchange because a conversation, forthright and direct, where views are discussed openly and honestly, is an action. Nothing happens, except through conversation. It is always the catalyst, the energizer.
The challenges are deep; the prospects for participation unmatched.
- Mayor Ellen Moyer.