City planner details Imagine Kalamazoo outreach, timeline for master‑plan update

City planner Christina Anderson told the Kalamazoo City Planning Commission on May 1 that Imagine Kalamazoo — the city's community engagement process to update its strategic vision and master plan — has moved from an initial listening phase into a more detailed phase focused on goals and outcomes and will produce drafts for public review ahead of a master‑plan expiration in October 2027.

Anderson said Imagine Kalamazoo began with "Imagine It," a phase that collected thousands of community contacts and yielded two primary documents central to city work: the strategic vision and the master plan. She described the current phase, called "Planet," as the step in which the city is turning earlier feedback into candidate goals and outcomes and testing them with the public and topic‑specific focus groups.

Nut graf: The Imagine Kalamazoo process will shape the city's strategic priorities and the master plan that guides land use, transportation and many capital and policy decisions. The update, Anderson said, aims to be more intentional about implementation by pairing goals with measurable outcomes and strategies.

Anderson outlined outreach activities completed and planned: five public meetings, topic‑specific focus groups led by partner organizations, pop‑up engagements and a "Meetings on the Go" toolkit that generated nearly 700 responses to date. She said staff are using a goals-outcomes-strategies-measures (GOSM) framework to translate community input into actionable policy guidance and that the city plans to release a draft strategic vision for public review later this summer.

She summarized recurring themes from the first phase: infrastructure, education, transportation, housing and environment as areas of progress; and continuing challenges including housing affordability, traffic and perception of safety. Anderson stressed that equity, inclusion and shared prosperity were recurring threads the community asked be woven into all future goals rather than stand‑alone items.

Anderson described additional outreach the city will undertake: targeted sessions with high‑school students, residents with disabilities and Gun Lake Scribe members, and an upcoming youth session facilitated by intern Emerson Whistlehoff. She invited community groups to request presentations and said individuals or groups can request an Imagine Kalamazoo meeting via her email (andersonc@kalamazoocity.org) or through the city's 311 service. "You can always go online and complete the activities," Anderson said, pointing listeners to ImagineKalamazoo.com.

Ending: Anderson said the master plan and strategic vision are intended as roughly 10‑year documents; after Planet the city will draft a strategic vision, then move to a "Design It" phase focused on strategies and measures and, ultimately, adopt a master plan for the next decade.