Bonus Episode: Lessons From 9 Strongest Town Contest Winners

This special episode of the Strong Towns Podcast explores the Strongest Town Contest, including what cities can learn from previous winners, what it means for cities to participate, and a preview of this year's Contest. Joining the discussion are Strong Towns staffers Lauren Ronnander and John Pattison, as well as Stephen Gawron, the former mayor of the 2018 Strongest Town, Muskegon, Michigan.

• Click here for a computer-generated transcript.

  Stephen Gawron 0:00

  You're doing something that looks insignificant. It's not insignificant if you put your heart, your soul, and that your your love of community into it.

  Chuck Marohn 0:18

  Everybody this chuck Marone with strong talents, we're going to do something a little different today. We've got a bonus podcast for you, and it's about the strongest town contest. For those of you that don't know, the strongest town contest, this is something we've been doing. This is our 10th one. So we've been doing this a while. Now, I'll give you a little bit of background. Years ago, there was an organization in our space who was doing, I don't know, kind of like a negative bracket based contest, like, worst city, you know.dot.it, was, it was very negative. And I looked at that and I thought, you know, there's so many places out there that, yes, have bad things going on and are making dumb decisions, and have parking craters and bad transit stops and like, whatever else was the thing on order. But there's a lot of cities out there doing great stuff, and they might not be the perfect place. They might not have everything figured out, but they're trying, and they're working hard, and there are lessons to be learned. There's things that we can celebrate. And so we created a contest around that idea of celebrating places that are making steps towards becoming a stronger town. We call it the strongest town contest. If you want to invite a place to be nominated to be part of this contest, strongest town.com is the website. So go to strongest town, one one word there, one long word.com, and you can, you can get your place signed up. There's a few questions that we ask. We are taking nominations now, when we kick off the contest, there'll be 16 different cities. We've kind of changed it up over the years. You know the first round, you go from 16 to eight, and it was kind of depressing, because a lot of stories got lost. And so what we've done is we've created a different system that expands things out a little bit, so we get to look at more places for longer, but it's based on voting of our audience, voting of our members. Members get weighted voting, so 50% of the vote comes from our members. 50% of the vote comes from a general audience. So members vote tend to count for a little bit more. And we do it that way because our members take this contest very seriously. They actually care about these places. They care about the places that we are going to not just nominate but move on to the next round and hold up as a place that we can all learn from this podcast episode today is going to be a conversation between Lauren on our team, John Patterson on our team, and Steven Gowron, who is a Former Mayor of Muskegon, Michigan. Muskegon was the 2018 strongest town winner, and he's a current local conversation leader in Muskegon. The three of them are going to chat Lauren ronender, our super communications director, John, who runs our local conversations program, and Steven, they're going to chat about the program, about insights, about what it means for cities to be part of it, and they're going to preview this coming year's contest. So please enjoy this show. Bonus, strong towns podcast content for all of you. Take care, everybody.

  John Pattison 3:39

  In all sincerity. If I had to point to one state and the United States where I sense the most momentum, certainly at, like, the local advocacy level. For me, it would be Michigan. And then, like, if I had to pick one province, it would be Ontario, where we're seeing but we have so many groups that are starting, so many local strong counts, groups that have started are starting up. One of our most recent ones is in southwest Michigan, in Benton Harbor. Oh, and yep. And I have, I have my own theory about why there is so much momentum in Michigan. And as you know, Stephen like now, the local conversations in Michigan are actually coordinating once, like, once a month or so, like on the statewide calls. Yeah, I'm curious, as somebody who is in Michigan and is a local leader, do you sense that momentum too? It's okay if you don't, but if, if you do what to what do you attribute it?

  Stephen Gawron 4:43

  Yeah, you know, I do. But you know, there's been cities like Grand Rapids that you know have been wrestling with and attempting to do their their zoning reform. There's been a push on some of this too, through our Michigan Union. Principal league with, without a doubt, everything with, you know, looking at more flexible zoning, they've been proponents of it as well as you know, pattern housing concepts and, and there's a number of us through the years. And I'm, a two time alumni of the mayor's Institute of city design, and I think that the stars have just aligned in some of our communities, and even Muskegon, you know, in 2015 we were one of the first communities in the United States to implement a form based code the level that we did on our central business district, and then we extended that out into one of the near neighborhoods to that with neighborhood contact zones, which actually was, you know, flexible to all heck and but we wanted to do that city wide, and we had a hard Time. There's a lot of pushback because of fears, fear mongers, people calling it stuff it wasn't. But I think we got most of what we wanted by not calling it neighborhood, contact zone and farm based code. We just rearranged our designations and said, Hey, why don't we just get rid of single family housing requirements and have some flexibility? We heard some of the citizens concerns, and so we did eliminate small quads. They thought that some citizens during our focus groups, and each one of our 15 neighborhoods, most of them, most of our neighborhoods, are all represented by a recognized Neighborhood Association. And so you take what you get right now, we didn't totally get rid of parking minimums. But now the minute minimums down to one, as opposed to requirements for, you know, whatever, two, four, etc. So you make it more palatable, and you take your victory where you can, yeah, but the most important thing is right now is that this, this this past and now we have a female led construction company is going to break ground on 14 houses in one of our neighborhoods that has a surplus of empty up to this Point, non buildable city lots. So yay.

  John Pattison 7:42

  Well, you know that your your analysis of the momentum and why there's a momentum in Michigan was much more sophisticated than mine, and so I'm gonna just use yours from now on. Mine is that, like Michigan was first, like one of the first into the suburban experiment. Yes, I feel like you have also, your state has was also the first, and Detroit is only the most famous example of like, kind of reaping that whirlwind. And so you have had to go first in a lot of ways in figuring out a way forward out of this. And so that is my non Michigander take on it. But I like, I really appreciate what you said.

  Stephen Gawron 8:26

  It was just a fluke of history. I just happened to be in, you know, the the top seat in the Michigan City and talking about these issues. We We have what's called urban core mayors of Michigan organization, and we're supported by the Michigan Municipal, municipal lead, and so a lot of the stuff on the table all the time, and then a part of the mayor's organization, we've been involved with all major industries in the state of Michigan, including, You know, for Ford Motor, Dan, Dan Gilbert's people, I've worked with his staff Mayor Duggan out of Detroit, and so in my nine and a half years on the in the mayor seat, the these concepts were being more than tossed About. But a lot of us have brought in organizations like you three and presentations by CNU. And you know, of course, going back prior to our winning the 2018 strongest towns, a lot of our staff and a couple of us commissioners, you know, really started delving into the strong towns movement,

  John Pattison 9:47

  yeah, and the Southwest Michigan group that I mentioned, that all started up when Chuck was brought in by a group in southwest Michigan. And after, I think, he talked in his presentation. About local conversations. And so over the course of the next two weeks, I had a bunch of different orientation calls with people in the Benton Harbor area, and I just connected them all with one another when I was done. And poof, wonderful. There's a new LC. And so like getting these not just strong towns presentations, but like getting people together in one place, having them hear these ideas, meet one another, and then kind of go forth from there has been as very powerful as you're saying. I am going to go ahead. First of all, I want to say hi also to Sarah Brady in Poway, California, and say hello to Karen Douglas, who's on the strong towns team as well as she runs all of our PR efforts and does many, many other things, but is a a public relations wizard, and has like, 100x our game at strong cows in terms of our ability and capacity to connect with local media. And then she's also done some great trainings for LCS and other and others about how they can do that as well. I am going to go ahead, even though it's it's a smaller group, and even though one of the three local conversation leaders has already won the strongest town contest, I'm going to go ahead and we're going to continue with with our presentation, because I know that a bunch of people watch this in recording afterward. And so we're going to do this in a couple and I think three parts. One is, I'm going to do a short presentation on some lessons or takeaways that I think are instructive looking back on the last nine years of the strongest town conversation contest, excuse me, then I'm going to pass it over to Lauren, and she's going to talk a bit about this year's contest, and then we'll just open it up for discussion. If that sounds okay to everyone else. Steven, when it comes to Muskegon in 2018 I'll probably lean more on you than on on me as somebody who, of course, was Mayor your town one, and you were part of the group that that did nominate your town, and you were part of that whole process. And so with that, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to share my screen. I told Lauren that one of the things that, as I was putting together this presentation, I was like, I wanted to get one different lesson from each place, but then, like, a lot of the lessons were actually the same. So let's think of it as, like, reinforcing the like, the key kind of strong towns ideas as much as anything else. And the reason why I thought it would be fun to do this, to revisit these contests, is because these are some some lessons and takeaways about what makes a strong town or city. There's some things that I think we as local advocates can learn from it. These are example examples like these towns and cities are examples that we as local advocates can point to when we're doing our own local advocacy. You know, so often we're like we hear from our our elected officials or even our neighbors. Well, show me. Show me a place that's done this where, you know, they've eliminated parking minimums and it hasn't all blown up. Well, we have so many examples, literally hundreds of examples, but every year we find one example that we can point to that's really powerful, and we celebrate them as many ways as we can. And so these are examples that we can point to. And then for folks who are watching this, you know, either on the on the session, now or later, if maybe you see yourself, your own town or your own city in these examples, and it might encourage you to nominate your own town for the strongest town contest. And so with that, I will go ahead and share my screen. Okay, yeah, so I kind of already gave the preview, so I thought I'd go kind of year by year, and kind of pick out one lesson from each community that I think is worth highlighting. We started. We launched the contest in 2016 Chuck talked a little bit about this at the state of strong towns, where, like we like we, wanted to do something that would really celebrate cities. Something that I learned when I first came on on staff at 2019 is that one of the criticisms that people even had of strong towns, is that like, we were like, so we were we were so negative, we were constantly pointing out everything that's wrong about how we're like, we're building towns and cities and so one of the things that we loved was that every year, first of all, I don't think that the criticism was totally fair, but I kind of get it. I also, frankly, I think that that's changed a little bit with, in part with the local conversations program, because now we have a 262 groups as of today, around the United States and Canada, 262 groups, not over 900 leaders that we get to tell these stories. And so there's like this. Never, like a never ending flow of amazing hero stories that we can tell. And for a long time, we didn't, we didn't know those heroes quite as well as we do now. But anyway, like for one or two months every single year, we were able to focus on the positive. Here are towns that are doing the work of becoming stronger. Like we weren't looking for the perfect community, the perfectly strong town, it doesn't exist, but we wanted to celebrate the places that were working hard to become stronger. And so in 2016 when we launched the contest, the winner that year was Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Carlisle is a city that is our town that's really steeped in history, has a population of about 20,000 people. One of the things that I had forgotten was that Carlisle beat out Hoboken New Jersey. And so, you know, Hoboken was was already being really celebrated as a place that was getting a lot of things right, but Carlisle won by like, 52% to 48% and Carlisle, with like, was celebrated for in the contest, for its tight knit community, its ability to like, it was unafraid to ask some of the tough questions, and ultimately like. I think one of the lessons here is that flexibility and adaptability are the our keys to becoming a strong town. We also saw that winning the contest for Carlisle, Pennsylvania was just the beginning. They have. They remained adaptable, and they continue to do zoning reforms. We wrote an article about them, I think in 2021 or 2022 about like how they were continuing to be flexible and adapt in ways that were worth celebrating. And the next year, Traverse City, Michigan, they also won 52 to 48 over Guelph, Ontario. We praise or Yeah, strong towns, but also the voters praised Traverse City for being a vibrant and engaged community. It was being proactive in its housing solutions. Was really committed to preserving its natural beauty, but I think as I was reviewing the different articles and stuff that we had written about Traverse City. What really stood out to me is how the city was prioritizing multimodal transportation. And I'm curious, Steven, if you know Traverse City well, like eight years on, is this something that you still see Traverse City I prioritizing is, you know, go ahead, I

  Stephen Gawron 17:42

  do. They're having a heck of a time, though, because of the increase in residential values. Oh yeah, they still have the issue of pushing out the actual County, you know. So it may, it may be nice that you have some shake from the Middle East buying a piece of property, but it's really jacking up all the costs there, you know, for the people that are waiting tables or pumping gas so that that's, that's still a struggle, and where, where they seem to be holding on to some of their population. They're up in northern Michigan, outside of the Traverse City area, there's, there's still a loss of youth, youth population going elsewhere. Cost of living, job availability,

  John Pattison 18:45

  yeah, that's good. That's good to know. Thank you for that update. But during the contest, we were like we we talked about how they were working to make their downtown to destination. They were investing in infrastructure for the long term, and then they were engaging decision the engaging citizens in decision making. And that, of course, brings us to 2018 and the winner that year was Muskegon, Michigan, and Steven I who did, who did Muskegon beat out over in that contest? You remember who you were up against? Oh god,

  Stephen Gawron 19:13

  I can't recall. Right off the bat, I really can't. Okay,

  John Pattison 19:18

  I didn't that. I didn't look it up, because I assume that you would know, but that's okay, like it's, yeah, I've

  Stephen Gawron 19:25

  been out of office for three years. Come on, you're

  John Pattison 19:27

  right. And this is, this is seven years ago, and History is written by the winners, right?

  Stephen Gawron 19:35

  And that's my back end walking down the street.

  John Pattison 19:38

  Oh, is it really? Oh, that's you. That's awesome, yeah. Well, I think Muskegon in in this contest and in the many, many other times that we have written about your city, Steven, one of the like, the key lessons for for towns and cities that want to be stronger is that small income. Mental growth can create lasting change. Muskegon revitalization shows that small community driven investments like affordable pop up shops, neighborhood engagement can be more effective than large scale high risk projects, and that local advocates can embrace smart and low risk development strategies to drive resilience. Of course, we've talked about these pop up shops many, many times. But then, more recently, we've written about the creative way in which your city is I think you're using tiff right in in order to spur, like spur creation of more housing.

  Stephen Gawron 20:41

  Yeah, the the our housing info program began about 2015 as well, but then we found a way with TIFs. But because we're an old industrial town, we have a lot of brownfield designation, so we took a pot of money, started building houses, and we utilize the Brownfield designation on the properties, and we can recapture those taxes to replenish the home building, so that, you know, right now, we're up to, you know, a few 100 houses that we, The city has contracted to have built both rental and owner occupied. So it's a continue, continually replenishing pot for the city. And we concentrate on our city owned lots of, you know, right around 400 or more and and we've been able to get flexible and creative in what we're putting on those lots, because some of those lots are from the 19th, early 20th century. And they're not the 50 by a hundreds that were mandated, you know, post World War Two, but they're the old, you know, 30 by 60, or, you know, the small lot, like we stay in old town that we made illegal, even though the house is still existed. So it a great success, and now we'll be able to expand it citywide.

  John Pattison 22:16

  Yeah, you know, one of the other things that we praised Muskegon, Muskegon for in the the contest was like, your your city's approach to community engagement, and you were obviously mayor at the time. Were there particular like, was there an approach to community engagement that you found to be particularly effective when you were mayor? Like, how did you connect with with citizens? Because that's something obviously like, what strong towns were very critical. Very critical often of how cities do public engagement, but this is something we actually praise about what you were doing. Sure.

  Stephen Gawron 22:49

  And oddly enough, I found out, and I didn't even know when I was at one of the mayor institutes, is that Muskegon was well known even going back in the 1990s further community engagement, and a lot of that grew out of the fact that the city really got behind supporting the development of the neighborhood association movement in Muskegon. So we had a built in partner. There you have 15 designated neighborhoods that you know, at different levels of, you know, sophistication. But we could start right there and get to those monthly meetings and and then build out a call for more meetings. And of course, back then, it would even be we used to have newspapers, so it would get into the newspapers, onto the city's website. But since I've left, we actually have a community engagement director, and we've been able to expand out into a mailed newsletter and sign ups for electronic communications, weekly communications from staff, the city manager, calendars, schedules. And it's, it's just a, just a great thing. But starting in 1990s we were doing it old school, but we were, you know, knocking on doors or helping get the information out in neighborhood association newsletters. And each one of the neighborhood associations were given an annual are given an annual grant through the city to help, you know, support that alliance and partnership. So I think it really did grow out of the neighborhood association program, because yet, you had a built in contact, you know, in each one of the districts in the city. Yeah, yeah. And it was I, it was just a priority of always, you know, drawing people on and even some of our formulating ideas for the future, having massive undertaking, undertakings like several months of community engagement and workshops called Imagine Muskegon in the early 2000s what do we want to see here? The mall is gone. You know, it's going to come down. What do we what do we see? How do we want to see our waterfront, another major undertaking, imagine Muskegon Lake. We're on the largest, deepest freshwater port in the Great Lakes. So you know, what do we do? And it's we get down and dirty. We we we hit at least three quad three areas of the city for large meetings, and then we'll do smaller ones as well, but, but staff takes the time and we and that, and that's been a part of our tradition going on 30 years now.

  John Pattison 26:11

  That's really incredible. There's so many, I mean, we you can see on the screen here, we have these pop up shops that we've written so much about and talked about so much. I think they're in almost every one of Chuck's presentations. Yeah, that he gives. There's so many reasons that we point again and again to miss Keegan. And I was talking with somebody at the National gathering about Michigan and about different cities in Michigan. And this, this person I was talking to was, it was kind of praising some of the other cities and, you know, and rightly so. But I said, I think I told you this, Stephen, I told this, I told this, this guy that I said, if I had to bet on one town in Muskegon, I'm in Michigan, it would be Muskegon, because of how you all think you were just thinking differently than so many other places about how to get stronger, like I would i My bet is on Muskegon. I don't know what I'm betting, but like just I guess I'm betting on your continued prosperity,

  Stephen Gawron 27:18

  and I appreciate that and when you're looking at these the first year, when they when they open in 2017 one of the things I brought back from some of my workshops of fellow mayors nationwide was okay, so you got all these empty lots because you tore down a mall and you're trying to restore a traditional downtown. So what's important to do? You got to develop some energy on these empty lots until you get the damn thing sold and, you know, put up the next permanent building. But at the same time, our city manager and also the President of the Chamber of Commerce were kicking around the same type of ideas. And what you see here the first iteration that was $25,000 to put up 10 prefab sheds. And we, you know, gussi them up a bit. I think we're up to 15 now. We added more through the years, and it's, it's just been a fantastic success with these small businesses. They operate from May through December approximately, and they coordinate with our farmers market day. Another reason we wanted to come up with these is that between that high rise building you see in the background, there's like an empty block until you got to any of the other businesses that were attempting to open up in downtown at the time. And we thought, you know, we get 10,000 people into our farmers market on Saturdays during the high season. It's the second largest Farmers Market in Michigan and the second oldest only Detroit. And how can we bring people into the downtown to see what's going on and some of these other small businesses attempting in restaurants, attempting to make a go. How can we bring that energy? So this was it. Let's try this. Let's keep those people downtown on Saturdays and draw them further down. And it worked to a good extent. And it drives the energy you're not sitting there with, you know, an empty lot doing nothing.

  John Pattison 29:43

  Yeah, that's incredible. It's incredible. It's a great story. And speaking of, speaking of stories, I moved away from this slide because I misspelled growth and I was too embarrassed to have it just like sitting up there. But speaking of, I really appreciate that so much. Stephen, I'm actually going to go move quicker through the rest of them. But what I want to encourage folks to do is, if you go to strongest town.com you will see like buttons for all of the different past winners, and you will like you'll be able to read their story, to read some of the takeaways. And then if you I can't, I don't think you can link from there. But if you go to our site and then just search the town name, it will pull up all of the other things that we've created, the articles, the podcasts, in the case of our few last, strongest town winners, our videos. And so I am going to, just like, quickly point out, like, the key takeaways from from these towns that that I see. But I really encourage you to go to strongest town.com, and read in more detail. They're also, like, a ton of pictures. It's also a beautiful website that that we created, or that Lawrence team created. And so I'm just going to go, I'm going to move quickly through these. And if there's a one of these takeaways that really appeals to you, that sounds interesting for your town, like I do encourage you to explore more in 2019 The winner was Pensacola, Florida. This was a town of, I think, of about 54,000 and the thing that we loved about Pensacola was how it was celebrating and fostering local businesses. Pensacola demonstrated the importance of growing local economies by investing in homegrown businesses and supporting entrepreneurs. This build built a community of local ownership and helps create economic resilience and sustainable growth in 2020 so 2019 Yeah, 2020 was actually the first one that I worked on, coming on staff and that and the winner was Watertown South Dakota. This was an interesting year to run a contest because COVID had just hit. But one of the things that we loved about Watertown South Dakota was how it was using mixed use development and how it was eliminating barriers for local businesses. Their success was coming from promoting mixed use development in its downtown and removing parking minimums, among other reforms. This created a more efficient people centered environment while supporting local business growth in 2021 the winner was Lockport. I do apologize that I'm moving fast. Hopefully there's something compelling in here for folks. And one of the things that we loved and celebrated about Lockport was how it was investing in people friendly infrastructure. Yeah, we don't really love to use the word pedestrian, because there's nothing pedestrian about a person on foot or on a bike, and so they're investing in people friendly infrastructure, making it easier for people to walk and to bike. And 2022, the winner was Jasper, Indiana. And what did I write down for Jasper? Oh, they were we liked how they were promoting long term planning and financial prudence. They were in very intentional about their communication of its new of their comprehensive plan, and their focus was on maintaining existing assets, which demonstrated that financial efficiency and long term thinking are critical for becoming a stronger community. Brattleboro Vermont was we celebrated them for the proactive zoning reforms and incremental policy changes, particularly around housing. Something else that I really appreciated about this, especially it came out, I think, pretty well in the video that Mike made, was just about the relationship between the town and the more rural communities around it, we need, like, strong I actually came to strong towns because I was interested, interested and passionate about land use in rural communities, like strong farms, strong farmers, strong rural communities, Like need, like strong towns, the and so if you can't, if you care about land use, if you want, like a new generation of farmers, to be able to afford to farm, to have a good markets for what they they produce, like you need to have. We need to have strong towns. In fact, I'll just say this really quickly. I was giving a talk at the, like the state Libertarian Party convention in Washington last year, gave, like a strong towns one on one talk. The person in front of me was a, like a ranching advocate from Texas, and he came up to me afterward and he said, John, like, what what you're talking about at strong towns is exactly what I'm talking about from the perspective of farmers and ranchers, like we're just coming at it from different directions, but it's the same exact message, which I totally agreed with. And then finally, the 2024 winner was mommy Ohio, and we celebrated them for their their proactive planning with reduced parking requirements and a focus on incremental housing development. And also something that we really appreciated was the way that they were taking a good and hard look at some of the struggles in their towns, around their town budget. And like, when we did this video on on Mommy, there were some people in the comments. Were like, oh, how could this be a strong town? Like, look at the budget problems. What makes it a strong town is that they are looking at their budget problems, and they're they're being realistic about what they are facing, and that is, in an in and of itself, sets them apart in a lot of ways. So that was, that was fast. Go to strongest town.com. You'll see a lots of great stuff about these communities. Lauren, do you want to talk a little bit about kind of like this year's contest?

  Lauren Ronnander 35:44

  I'll try to keep it pretty brief. This is the 10th year that will be running the strongest town contest. It's in the past two years strong towns. The organization has invested a ton into improving the contest in a lot of ways. One of the first things that we did was we, instead of hosting the strongest town contest on strongtowns.org where it tended to get buried, where the voting interface wasn't super user friendly, we gave it its own dedicated website, and started investing a little bit more explicitly into promoting the contest on social media, using public relations efforts, etc. Karen has been really, really instrumental in getting us to a place where, where we can take the media wins that the participating towns get on a local level and amplify them on a regional or even national scale. So I guess it's worth saying that having a website manager, and having a public relations specialist, instead of trying to do all of these things, non specialists has been a really big upgrade for the contest, and we've seen results based on those investments in our voter in our voter base for the contest, we've got 10s of 1000s of voters, sometimes per round even. And we have also seen that in website traffic, not just to the strongest town website, where people can see these examples of towns that are striving to become more resilient, but through that website, to strongtowns.org where they can people who might not have been exposed to the strong towns approach can find it can start to connect the dots between that and what they're seeing in their own communities and and come into the movement. So those are and then, with the National gathering, we get to send representatives from the winning community to wherever that national gathering is to accept prize and to be celebrated by a big, big, big room full of people in person which can be really powerful in a movement that is disparate geographically speaking. Finally, did

  John Pattison 38:28

  mommy bring, like, a big I mean, I know, oh yeah, Cincinnati last year, and so it was easy for mommy to bring a big contingent, but weren't they like, do they have t shirts or buttons or something? Oh,

  Speaker 1 38:38

  I don't know if they had gear, but I remember when they all showed up at the same time, and like all of them were so engaged and excited, and like they were a joy to be around. You can see, this is all of the it might be all of them, but this is how many people came from mommy to accept the award together on stage. It was really something to see. And finally, with, by bringing on video producers, we've been able to continue to tell the story of the winner through a like medium format documentary video. These are getting hundreds of 1000s of views on Youtube and and really like getting into the story in a way that's that's deeper than we have in the past. So we're growing the contest. We're investing more in it because it it expands the the impact of the strong towns movement. It provides examples for communities to look at so that they can see that these. Approaches, the reforms that strong towns advocates are are advocating for, are effective, have positive results. They can see models of of success and and help push back against some of the hesitancies and fears that that people can have when facing a new approach. Also worth mentioning is that since Steven, since Muskegon has won, we've added another round to the strongest town contest. Because what we what we realized in our approach, we realized that communities that that nominate their place for the strongest town contest, they're putting in some some effort, some work, to tell their stories. Um, we're making an effort to extract those stories from the nominations themselves, even from communities that are not selected, ultimately, to compete. And then we added another round for the 16 communities that are invited to compete in the strongest town contest, because we want to give them more of a spotlight. We want to make it more worth their while. We don't want to invite them into this this space. And then immediately, we don't want to lose the connection that we have with them when they get eliminated in the first round, when eight of them ultimately don't win their matchups. So that's what I got, and I'm happy to answer questions or talk about it, or I

  John Pattison 41:40

  have a question. One of the I think that something that local conversation leaders and probably a lot of strong towns advocates struggle with is I think that, and I don't Okay, I think that strong towns people are more likely than others to see what's going wrong with our community. We kind of see where we have been trained to look under the hood. And what would you say to folks who are like, you know, maybe they're maybe their their town is doing some good things for like, My town is not the strongest town because of XYZ. Any any words of encouragement for them, I

  Speaker 1 42:28

  put into the chat this summary that's that is on the strongest town website now to help frame what this contest is all about, a strong town is not a perfect town. A strong Town is a place where members of the community are observing, observing, where people are struggling, finding ways to address that struggle, and then iterating on that approach, that it is a constant process of becoming a strong town. It is not a destination, and we want to celebrate that process. And John, we had an opportunity to explore this question earlier, in a different call. I think that people who are involved in the work of making their towns stronger, who are who are in that place where they're so focused on the problems and addressing the problems and finding approaches to not solve but work on them. They might be the people who will who need this contest and to need to give it some serious consideration, because it will prompt you. It will obligate you to celebrate where you have had successes, like give your give yourself the strongest town contest, so that you can take a pause and celebrate the work that you have been doing, and the wins and those incremental steps toward becoming more resilient. This year's nomination form, we've worked a lot on the nomination process in the past two years as well. We want to make sure that we are asking really, really good questions that encourage people to think positively about their place and in ways that are relevant to those places. We don't want to lose people because these questions seem too technical, or because the nominator might be a lay person who doesn't have access to like, all of the information about a city budget. For example, we've changed the approach so that we ask people to answer at least three of five questions that get at strong town's core campaigns, the things that we know are correlated with. Towns becoming more financially resilient and where people prosper. Um, how are, how is your city prioritizing people and safe streets over moving automobiles? What kind of progress is your place making to to rigorously account for its expenses and long term liabilities and make sure that investments produce a return, or at least break even. What kind of approaches are your is your city using to get rid of parking minimum mandates? And how are you using that land and opening up the door for that land to be used in a more productive way? How are you promoting incremental and bottom up housing development? And how are you shifting your priorities from building more highway infrastructure or infrastructure to maintaining existing infrastructure or putting it to better uses? We're we're hoping for narratives. We're hoping for stories again, so that we can tell those stories everywhere, even if it's just part from the nomination process. I

  John Pattison 46:11

  like that you that you mentioned that, because I think in the in the past, the nomination process was like, pretty I overwhelming in the amount of detail we were asking for. Also the first round was all text. And so it was just very, I think it was very intimidating. And so now we have like groups that are, like towns that are nominated, they're not necessarily kicked out of the in the first round, you know. And so, like, there's a, there's chance for them to to really, kind of get the word out, but we're also asking for photos early on. And so it's, like, much more visual. I think it's just a much more accessible contest than it used to be, which is important, because we want, like, we want nominations to come, not just from mayors and from, you know, or from tourism boards, which, frankly, like tend to be the worst nominations, is like the ones coming from tourism boards, if I'm as I say that as somebody who ran the contest for a few years, but like, we want them to come from local advocates, people who love their places, love it, love you know, warts and all, and so we wanted to make it accessible for them. And I think that it's we've we've done that I

  Speaker 1 47:27

  can offer, in case somebody watches this, regarding things that stand out in nominating your place are specific stories of specific efforts. And I think Steven Muskegon is a really good example of that, because we have referenced the pop up shop chalet village so many times that is a specific, replicable model that is creative, that demonstrates the process of seeing an opportunity looking at the assets in your community and putting them to optimum use. So

  Stephen Gawron 48:06

  it does when you're done on that, oh,

  Speaker 1 48:09

  let, I'll just finish the thought, and then please Yes. So the the some people fill out these nominations with kind of like general statements, yes, we are investing in incremental housing, or yes, we are, whatever the broad strokes might be, but those sorts of specific stories are going to get you picked because they are they are demonstrative, they're illustrative. People can relate to them really well, and they give the voters something that they can they can really see in their minds. So it's very compelling, and that is simpler in a lot of ways, trying to address the big question, tell a small story. One last thing, please forgive me, is that if a local conversations member wants to fill out this nomination form, and you get to the photo part where we ask for captions, I would invite you to like, upload a couple of photos and then say, like, can provide more info, like I give local conversations that special privilege, because I know that you guys are going to make good on photos later, and I want to, I especially want to make it easy on you guys to nominate your places. We want to be able to celebrate them. So thank you for giving me a minute. Stephen,

  Stephen Gawron 49:41

  sorry for not at all. I just want I just, you know, before I went out my other ear, but it had, John, you had said something earlier as well about, you know, people may hesitate. People may not recognize. Within themselves that they have something valuable, you know, something to crow about. Because even at the time that, you know, it was brought up, and I said, you know, hey, staff, let's get into this contest. And other people were feeling the same thing. And but then you're going, you know, but what do we got? But we had a lot of stuff, and I was really amazed that it came down to the chalets, because we had just taken 18 blocks of an urban highway and, you know, restored it to residential and commercial streets, and now we got neighborhoods again. We had, you know, put up an entire neighborhood on a massive empty lot, and started a resurgence with our neighborhood context. And I thought, well, you know, these, these are big and shiny and everything else, but then you think about it, and you become a little more of a student of the history of, you know, urbanism and whatnot. And I'm going, Oh, geez, you know those, those could have been they weren't, but those could have been catastrophic infusions of money, because you're talking multi million dollars of instant dump, boom. I mean, we needed to get rid of the highway without, without, without, without a doubt, I thought, but, but how did we end up with chalet? I know why because, because it's, you know, it's, all it was immediately doable, you know, and, and it's replicable, and you didn't need $100 million and you can do it with 25 you know, it's, it's, it's that, it's that first, it's that first small step, you know, leading to the repeat. Of course, that made sense. It's a beautiful thing. You know? It really was, nobody should sell themselves short with a small the small bet, because a lot of cities do it, and they don't even know they're doing a massive amount of work with their small bets. You know, it's never sell yourself short, because you know if you love your town and you're doing something that looks insignificant, it's not insignificant. If you put your heart, your soul and that your your love of community, into it. There's nothing insignificant.

  John Pattison 52:42

  I think that's an incredible way to kind of wrap up. If that's if everyone's okay with that, we're kind of at, we're at the exactly at the top of the hour. I just, I love that, Steven, yeah, I love that. It's that's the message. I think that's the message of strong towns. I think it's what we want our message to be, that it all matters. And we at strong towns, and we as local advocates, get to focus on on what is present as at least as much as what's absent, and get to celebrate what's there. And we're gonna we're going to start with what we start with, start where we are, and we're going to build on what we have. And you said that so beautifully when I post this. If you're watching this later, check the description for all of the different links that have been shared in the chat. The strongest town contest is open for nominations right now. Nominations close on February 16, and so go to strongest town.com to learn more. Yeah, I just I hope that you, I hope that folks who are watching this will consider nominating their community. Last year we had a bunch of local conversation leaders nominate their places, and it was awesome, because it's not it's not only a reflection of your communities, it's a reflection of all of the work that you're doing and a reflection of the love that you have for your places. And so this is we love, this time of year. It's when we get to focus, like relentlessly, on the positive and all of the good things that are happening and the good people who are doing it. Lauren, thank you so much for being here for office hours. Karen, thank you for being here. Steven, thank you for your massive contribution to this office hours. Sarah, thank you for being here in Poway and all of your faithful work and everyone else who tuned in. If you have any questions about strongest town contest. Reach out to me, Lauren, should they reach out? Who should they reach out to on your team? Oh,

  Lauren Ronnander 54:46

  I welcome. I welcome emails, lauren@strongtowns.org Rachel que no. Can also answer questions about the strongest town contest. She's rachel@strongtowns.org and I am sure that if. Anybody media related listens to this and wants to know about strongest town contest, they should reach out to Karen, Karen at org. How easy is

  John Pattison 55:09

  that? Yeah, so easy. And Karen, like, like, like Lauren said, like, Karen is so good now at getting the word out in local communities, like, for the towns that are nominated, like, it becomes like a full court, like, Blitz, or that's the mixing sports metaphors, but like, press on on media, and that's that's thanks to Karen's hard work and incredible skill. Thank you everyone for being here. Thanks for you. After the fact. I'm grateful for all of you, and keep doing what you can To build your strongest town,

  Stephen Gawron 55:40

  Bye, everyone. Good night.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• Learn more about the Strongest Town Contest.

• Nominate your place (anyone can do this for free, even if you’re not a local official or city staff!)

• Chuck Marohn (Substack).

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