Osakis, MN vs. Yellow Springs, OH
Welcome to this first round match-up in the sixth annual Strongest Town Contest! In this round, 16 towns are facing off, and eight will advance to the next segment of the contest based on your votes. We invite you to read answers representatives from these two cities provided to our questions about economic resilience, citizen involvement, community response to the pandemic, and more. Then vote for the strongest at the bottom of this page.
Can’t decide? If you’re looking for inspiration, check out how we describe the Strong Towns approach, or take a look at our free ebook, The Local Leader’s Toolkit: A Strong Towns Response to the Pandemic.
You may vote once per match-up.
Round 1 voting closes at 12pm CDT on Thursday, March 18th.
For rules, and to follow along with the contest, visit the Strongest Town Contest page.
Note: All entries are lightly edited for clarity and readability.
OSAKIS, MN
Entry submitted by: Justin Dahlheimer, Angela Jacobson, Dan Wessell
What is your favorite thing about your town?
The community involvement and ability to come together when we have many diverse backgrounds converging on our Town. We are a town of generational farmers, lake-loving tourists, regional workers, and outdoor enthusiasts which often can create conflict in visioning, but we have been able to achieve coordinated efforts and keep the town we love thriving.
How easy is it to live in your town without regular access to a car? What are some steps your town has taken—or is in the process of taking—to make it safer and easier to walk, bike, or use a wheelchair?
We have a great trail running through our town that connects biking, and we redesigned our downtown about three years ago to widen the sidewalks, slow down traffic and cater to our trail users and pedestrians. We will be soon finishing our comprehensive plan and an element that was focused on was adding more sidewalks and trails and connections.
What are some steps your town has taken—or is in the process of taking—to increase housing options and affordability?
We have been aggressive with our redevelopment of existing neighborhoods. We have allocated Economic Development Funds specifically for existing housing improvements, deconstruction and building on existing lots. We have been creative in our downtown areas to allow more density than traditional parking requirements often inhibit. We are considering increasing our impervious surface requirements to allow for modern improvement of old-style lots. We actually rezoned an area of Town in the last five years to accommodate these older lots and allow for more development on them.
At Strong Towns, we believe that financial solvency is a prerequisite for long-term prosperity. What steps has your community taken to ensure its financial security? How do local leaders adequately do the math on new investments proposed in your town to ensure that they’ll be able to afford them now and afford their maintenance in the future?
We have taken an old-school approach to our budgeting, that we need to save more than we spend, utilize what we have, and take incremental steps to beautify our town. We prefer many small projects and unifying different organizations to increase buy-in to our redevelopment and maintenance. Our downtown redesign was successful in bringing investment back and we were able to secure a large donation to pay for the design improvements and lessen the assessments on our downtown property owners.
At Strong Towns, we believe that local government is a platform for strong citizens to collaboratively build a prosperous place. How are residents in your town involved in shaping its future? How do residents’ experiences, struggles and concerns directly inform the projects undertaken by local government? Provide one or more examples.
We are finishing our comprehensive plan, which has been a culmination of community feedback opportunities that started with our local school civics class issuing a survey to the community as a way to increase involvement. We then targeted our school staff with a survey (as many choose not to live in our Town). And then we had a more official survey done with our comprehensive plan process. We have been holding many meetings, even with COVID, to press forward in our visioning for our town’s future. Our local leaders participate in many different organizations and bring that feedback to our City Council. We have held contests to name parks and redesign our City logo to increase citizen involvement.
How is your town proactively making it possible for more people to get outdoors safely during the pandemic?
We put up a skating rink on a vacant lot downtown which turned into a place with a community Christmas tree that was donated by citizens. We held a light parade that had huge turnout for our local businesses and included our local nursing home so those residents could feel the community having their support. The demand for that skating rink is turning into visioning for a grant to put in a new park with improvements that should bring more outdoor commerce.
How is your town proactively helping local businesses and entrepreneurs during the pandemic? Describe how you are providing flexibility for small businesses and entrepreneurs to adapt and innovate.
Our local bank led an initiative to buy over $25,000 in gift cards from local businesses in March, then redistributed them in various manners throughout the summer to give initial cash flow to our businesses, and then sought out new customer segments when giving those gift cards back out. The local businesses worked together in promoting each other on social media. The local city leadership was flexible with road closure policies and patio policies and parking to accommodate outside space for our businesses to utilize.
How are you measuring success and progress during this pandemic? What metrics tell you that your community is thriving and what metrics have helped you see where people are struggling?
We measure success by the fact that we have not lost a business to closure, have strong demand for our building space, and increased property values within our community. Our enrollment at our local school is stable and we have numerous planning and zoning applications for new housing and improvements to existing housing. We are also seeing a growing group of people contacting our City that are going to be teleworking for the foreseeable future and are looking for unique live/work space options that we are exploring. The local bank is starting the design of a telework/community space to begin some business incubation.
Image credit: Aaron Zaremsky
YELLOW SPRINGS, OH
Entry submitted by: Raven Behrens, Johnnie Burns, Denise Swinger, Marianne MacQueen, Brian Housh, Josue Salmeron, Judy Kintner
What is your favorite thing about your town?
Yellow Springs is walkable, vibrant, and welcoming! It is heartwarming witnessing our community coming together during COVID-19 by immediately setting in place modes of communication, special programs, and safety measures to protect our citizens and our small businesses. Despite our Village’s size (population 3,487), we have an array of cultural and arts activities and are surrounded by a natural environment, including the Glen Helen Nature Preserve, Clifton Gorge State Nature Preserve, and the John Bryan State Park. We are a full-service municipality with ownership of our electric, water and sanitary sewer utilities. We have a dedicated Police and Public Works Department overseeing 3 square miles, of which 590 acres are parks and green space. A new enterprise is currently in the planning phase to launch a municipal fiber-optic broadband service, and public WIFI hot spots with fiber backbone have already been installed in the downtown area.
How easy is it to live in your town without regular access to a car? What are some steps your town has taken—or is in the process of taking—to make it safer and easier to walk, bike, or use a wheelchair?
The addition of bike lanes, paving of alleyways for walking, improvements made to crosswalks for safer crossing, ADA-compliant ramps, and the creation of an Active Transportation Plan to add and improve sidewalks throughout the Village—these are just a few accomplishments already in place. Our town was recently awarded a safety grant of $1.8 million dollars to make extensive improvements to several traffic intersections and the creation of a multi-modal path, which will run 4,000 feet along a major arterial road, an identified goal in our Active Transportation Plan. In 2011, the Village took responsibility for the maintenance of all sidewalks in the public right of way. In line with Strong Towns incremental approach, we have been grinding down sidewalk trip hazards rather than pulling up sidewalks and building new. Since 2016, the Public Works Department has repaired or installed over 3 miles of sidewalks, and performed grinding of another 5,675 linear feet to remove trip hazards. In 2017, our Village also completed a portion of a project through the Ohio Dept of Transportation (ODOT) called Safe Routes to School, which added sidewalks to parts of town where none existed. This allowed safe pathways for children to walk to school. Additionally, the Village has a Complete Streets policy to actively work toward improving the safety and connectivity for all who use the streets and sidewalks in town. Council has also expressed a desire to not vacate alleys in order to allow for the planning of future pedestrian pathways.
What are some steps your town has taken—or is in the process of taking—to increase housing options and affordability?
The Village of Yellow Springs has long supported Yellow Springs Home, Inc., a 20-year-old nonprofit Community Land Trust that builds new and rehabs existing affordable housing. It was originally started as the result of a Village Council Affordable Housing Task Force.
The Village manager meets monthly with a Manager’s Housing Advisory Board (HAB), which began in 2017 as a team that came together at the directive of Village Council. Its purpose is to encourage greater housing choices as a strategy to build a diverse community that includes seniors, young adults and families, and represents persons from varied ethnic and economic groups. Its first achievement was a Housing Needs Assessment (HNA) by Bowen National Research in 2018, which determined we had just 114 government subsidized rental units. Since that study, the Planning Commission has approved multiple applications to build affordable housing in the Village, with the most recent project approved being a Pocket Neighborhood Development by Yellow Springs Home, Inc.
In addition to all these efforts, the Village Council has waived tap fees for Yellow Springs Home, Inc.’s affordable housing projects and donated funds to incentivize affordable housing developments and help builders obtain grants, all with the goal of encouraging and supporting affordable housing initiatives in the Village. The goal is to continue to increase the total number of affordable housing units in the coming years, both rental and owner-occupied.
At Strong Towns, we believe that financial solvency is a prerequisite for long-term prosperity. What steps has your community taken to ensure its financial security? How do local leaders adequately do the math on new investments proposed in your town to ensure that they’ll be able to afford them now and afford their maintenance in the future?
Our Village Manager, Public Works Director and Finance Director have taken great strides to ensure the budget is well-balanced for crucial projects for both the present and the future. The Capital budget is annually set at one through five-year projections to maintain a “big picture” framework for infrastructure investments. The Village team regularly seeks out grant opportunities. The Village’s Finance Director and Treasurer have overseen the safe investment of Village funds via interest earning accounts, and similar safe investment opportunities.
At Strong Towns, we believe that local government is a platform for strong citizens to collaboratively build a prosperous place. How are residents in your town involved in shaping its future? How do residents’ experiences, struggles and concerns directly inform the projects undertaken by local government? Provide one or more examples.
In 2019, the Zoning Administrator launched the Comprehensive Land Use Plan Update project. Public outreach for the 2020 Comprehensive Land Use Plan included a kickoff meeting held in 2019 with 80 attendees, an Open House with an estimated 150 attendees, four online surveys with 327 responses, seven focus group interviews with 43 participants. On August 4, 2020, in an effort to maintain social distancing, an all-day outdoor open house was held in front of the Yellow Springs Chamber of Commerce with display stations set up for people to review the final draft. Online, over the course of one year there were 1,099 unique visitors to the website, with 1,499 total visits.
Yellow Springs has active participation in Village government. One of the ways residents participate is on our volunteer Boards and Commissions. These bodies collaborate with local nonprofits and educational institutions. For example, the Arts and Culture Commission recently had a workshop for youth to make activist banners that were displayed downtown. The Environmental Commission has created a team with local environmental groups to help community members create native habitats. Their efforts have resulted in Yellow Springs becoming certified as a Native Wildlife Habitat Community by the National Wildlife Federation.
Residents regularly participate at our bi-monthly Council meetings. During COVID-19, community engagement has increased since transitioning to virtual Council meetings. The Village Government hosts community-wide meetings and focus groups on topics of concern to the community. This included an event to provide updates and gauge community concerns on an environmental remediation project, as well as virtual town halls being held weekly to go over important updates, such as COVID-19 case information.
How is your town proactively making it possible for more people to get outdoors safely during the pandemic?
We are a small village of 3,487 and during the warmer season we draw regional tourists, which can increase to an estimated 20,000 people.
Our Village Government has taken great measures to ensure safety, which include but are not limited to the following:
Council passed the first ordinance in the State of Ohio requiring that face coverings be worn by all in the downtown area.
Council continued meeting and conducting Village business by switching to virtual platforms, and held extra emergency meetings to address COVID-19.
Our Peace Officers have distributed thousands of masks, and peacefully engaged with people not wearing masks to increase compliance without resorting to punitive measures. In coordination with Public Works and Miami Township Fire-Rescue (MTFR), they have overseen the safety and street closures for Black Lives Matter demonstrations, and a Pride Car Parade. They also held a Trunk or Treat on Halloween, a drive-thru event hosted at the fire station, and hosted a car parade for graduating seniors from Yellow Springs High School.
Our Parks and Recreation Department opened the only public swimming pool in Greene County, and with extra staff and COVID-19 protocol, were able to operate the public pool safely through the pandemic.
Our Public Works Department installed 35 hand sanitizing stations throughout downtown and Village parks and the public swimming pool. They painted social distancing markers on sidewalks, and installed extensive signage downtown. They hired extra staff to clean public restrooms next to the Little Miami Scenic Trail every two hours. They installed an Ionization air filter on the HVAC systems at government facilities.
Twelve free high-speed WIFI access points were installed in the downtown area.
How is your town proactively helping local businesses and entrepreneurs during the pandemic? Describe how you are providing flexibility for small businesses and entrepreneurs to adapt and innovate.
The Yellow Springs Community Foundation, a local non-profit, offered grants to those affected by the lockdown.
The Village Government purchased and provided free-of-charge hand sanitizer to local businesses. As of February of 2021, the Village has provided nearly 250 gallons of hand sanitizer freely to the public, with 250 more gallons in stock to continue through 2021.
Village government distributed CARES Act money directly to local businesses via an assistance grant, in addition to the grant offered to local businesses to upgrade their air filtration systems to GPS BI-Polar Ionization air filters.
How are you measuring success and progress during this pandemic? What metrics tell you that your community is thriving and what metrics have helped you see where people are struggling?
Due to the face mask mandate, our total number of cases was very low compared to other communities, with 40 positive cases and 3 deaths within the corporation limits.
We saw around 85 pool attendees daily over a slightly shorter season. Many of the attendees were low-income youth, and on average 12-15 children were provided free lunches daily. Fourteen children attended the Youth Center to have a place to do their remote learning.
It is estimated around 25% of our youth are low-income, and many relied on school lunches for food during the day. Village Staff, in tandem with the Yellow Springs Schools, provided and delivered meals daily to families and children in need during and after lockdown.
The John Bryan Community Center has also provided space for the High School Speech and Debate team, who won two tournaments.
The MTFR provided free COVID rapid testing weekly at their station and are now offering free take-home test kits.
During lockdown, many people lost their jobs and therefore their income. Village Council addressed those struggling by passing an ordinance for “Pay to Stay,” to allow those who fall behind on their rent to get caught up and continue their lease. Utility disconnections were suspended, and payment plans were offered to those who fell behind. Miami Township Trustees donated $15,000 in CARES act funding they received to the Village Community Outreach Specialist so that we could assist residents with food, rent and utilities.
Citizens also established a Neighborhood Block contact repository, for people to be able to communicate easily with their neighbors if they needed help or were shut in.
All these efforts demonstrated a strong sense of community, where the whole town came together to weather the pandemic.