Trends & Ideas
A New Approach to Confronting New Challenges
by Ted DeLong
from Insights, our electronic magazine, March 2009 issue
In early 2008, the leaders of Salt Lake County, Utah faced a dilemma: should they support the development of a 2,500-seat venue to house touring Broadway in the suburban city of Sandy, or a project to develop a similar venue in downtown Salt Lake City, only 15 miles away?
At the same time, County leadership faced pressure from the burgeoning suburban population -- a majority of the County's 980,000 residents -- to address the grassroots arts and cultural needs of their communities.
The County asked AMS for help in confronting these interrelated challenges by preparing a sweeping Cultural Facilities Master Plan. Although many metropolitan regions have completed cultural plans, this project is, in our experience, one of the first in North America to exclusively and comprehensively consider the future of cultural facilities.
The Salt Lake plan was motivated by several interconnected developments in the County's political and cultural landscape. The County has experienced rapid growth in its suburban communities, shifting the County's center of population gravity south, away from the capital city and the traditional "cultural core" of downtown Salt Lake City. This suburban growth, coupled with Utah's strong tradition of community arts, stimulated an expansion of arts and cultural activity around the region, and sparked calls from civic leaders and arts organizations to provide more cultural facilities throughout the County. Looming over the planning process was the politically sensitive issue of competing projects to develop new 2,500-seat theaters. These proposals, for both a new downtown venue and one located in the suburban city of Sandy, would likely impact the existing venues in and near downtown Salt Lake City owned by the County and the University of Utah.
AMS was engaged to step into this shifting environment to formulate a comprehensive plan that determined the overall community needs for cultural facilities, provided a means to evaluate competing priorities and suggested how best to deploy public resources to meet those needs. Such a plan, it was hoped, would answer many of the questions swirling like snow above the Wasatch, and would encourage responsible, coherent facility development that avoided duplication and satisfied as many members of a vast group of stakeholders as possible.
Our approach to the Cultural Facilities Master Plan was many-pronged, including: interviews of over 140 stakeholders, politicians and community leaders; telephone and internet survey responses from over 1,600 members of the public; a facility-needs survey of over 100 arts and cultural organizations; an inventory of the current supply of buildings for use by the cultural sector; and market analysis to determine nodes of cultural participation and audience potential. This research was overseen by a Stakeholders' Committee of 58 community leaders, artists and County staff. AMS was joined throughout our efforts by several subconsultants, including David Plettner, of the Cultural + Planning Group; Jerry Allen, of Jerry Allen & Associates; Leigh Breslau, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Architects; and Elliot Levin, of Partnership Resources Group.
The final Master Plan contains three major components, each arrived at through a particular, innovative thought process or organizing framework.
At the core of the Master Plan is a Needs Assessment for cultural facilities. In order to address the expressed needs for facilities throughout the County, and to account for the disparities of population size, projected growth, demographics, and geography, we adopted as a framework for our analysis five geographically defined "Planning Areas." These areas allowed us to compare regions of the County on roughly equal terms, to dispense with the tricky vocabulary of "city" versus "suburban," and to group existing facilities and facility needs in an efficient and logical manner.
Following from the Needs Assessment, a list of 15 Master Plan Projects was winnowed from a long list of projects proposed by cultural organizations and community leaders. The process of getting to the final 15 projects was guided by two primary lodestars: a Vision and set of Principles established in collaboration with the Stakeholders' Committee. We used these two sets of criteria as an expression of the community's preferences in evaluating facility projects, although we caution that the list of Master Plan Projects is not a list of "shovel-ready" projects. It is simply a group of projects AMS believes most fully satisfy the requirements of the Vision and Principles, and help to satisfy the expressed needs of the cultural community.
The third component of the Master Plan is a Support Program designed to guide County funding decisions regarding support of facility projects. The Support Program defines a comprehensive process of qualification and evaluation, aided by a technical assistance program, with successful, well-planned projects eventually receiving County support for capital or operations funding, or both. AMS designed the Support Program within a "Framework for Decision-Making," developed earlier in the Master Plan process. The Framework, as it became known, attempted to express the "value" derived from any given facilities project as a combination of, and balance between, three sets of component values: Social, Economic, and Cultural. Social Value is made up of factors such as a project's capacity to create of a sense of community, engage the entire family, and enable arts education. Economic Value includes factors like a project's capacity to create jobs, contribute to long-term economic development, and generate multiplier-effect tax revenue. Cultural Value is made of factors such as a project's capacity to foster artistic innovation and support the cultural community. Taken together, the balance of factors present in any given project adds up to the project's Community Value. While it may be appropriate for a project to emphasize Economic Value over Cultural or Social values, the balance of all three must be right in each project for it to be appropriate for public support. Applying the Framework (along with the Vision and Principles) in developing the Support Program has led to a process that is, we believe, fair, inclusive, and objective.
As of this writing, the Cultural Facilities Master Plan is on a path towards formal County approval and implementation.
from Insights, our electronic magazine, March 2009 issue
In early 2008, the leaders of Salt Lake County, Utah faced a dilemma: should they support the development of a 2,500-seat venue to house touring Broadway in the suburban city of Sandy, or a project to develop a similar venue in downtown Salt Lake City, only 15 miles away?
At the same time, County leadership faced pressure from the burgeoning suburban population -- a majority of the County's 980,000 residents -- to address the grassroots arts and cultural needs of their communities.
The County asked AMS for help in confronting these interrelated challenges by preparing a sweeping Cultural Facilities Master Plan. Although many metropolitan regions have completed cultural plans, this project is, in our experience, one of the first in North America to exclusively and comprehensively consider the future of cultural facilities.
The Salt Lake plan was motivated by several interconnected developments in the County's political and cultural landscape. The County has experienced rapid growth in its suburban communities, shifting the County's center of population gravity south, away from the capital city and the traditional "cultural core" of downtown Salt Lake City. This suburban growth, coupled with Utah's strong tradition of community arts, stimulated an expansion of arts and cultural activity around the region, and sparked calls from civic leaders and arts organizations to provide more cultural facilities throughout the County. Looming over the planning process was the politically sensitive issue of competing projects to develop new 2,500-seat theaters. These proposals, for both a new downtown venue and one located in the suburban city of Sandy, would likely impact the existing venues in and near downtown Salt Lake City owned by the County and the University of Utah.
AMS was engaged to step into this shifting environment to formulate a comprehensive plan that determined the overall community needs for cultural facilities, provided a means to evaluate competing priorities and suggested how best to deploy public resources to meet those needs. Such a plan, it was hoped, would answer many of the questions swirling like snow above the Wasatch, and would encourage responsible, coherent facility development that avoided duplication and satisfied as many members of a vast group of stakeholders as possible.
Our approach to the Cultural Facilities Master Plan was many-pronged, including: interviews of over 140 stakeholders, politicians and community leaders; telephone and internet survey responses from over 1,600 members of the public; a facility-needs survey of over 100 arts and cultural organizations; an inventory of the current supply of buildings for use by the cultural sector; and market analysis to determine nodes of cultural participation and audience potential. This research was overseen by a Stakeholders' Committee of 58 community leaders, artists and County staff. AMS was joined throughout our efforts by several subconsultants, including David Plettner, of the Cultural + Planning Group; Jerry Allen, of Jerry Allen & Associates; Leigh Breslau, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Architects; and Elliot Levin, of Partnership Resources Group.
The final Master Plan contains three major components, each arrived at through a particular, innovative thought process or organizing framework.
At the core of the Master Plan is a Needs Assessment for cultural facilities. In order to address the expressed needs for facilities throughout the County, and to account for the disparities of population size, projected growth, demographics, and geography, we adopted as a framework for our analysis five geographically defined "Planning Areas." These areas allowed us to compare regions of the County on roughly equal terms, to dispense with the tricky vocabulary of "city" versus "suburban," and to group existing facilities and facility needs in an efficient and logical manner.
Following from the Needs Assessment, a list of 15 Master Plan Projects was winnowed from a long list of projects proposed by cultural organizations and community leaders. The process of getting to the final 15 projects was guided by two primary lodestars: a Vision and set of Principles established in collaboration with the Stakeholders' Committee. We used these two sets of criteria as an expression of the community's preferences in evaluating facility projects, although we caution that the list of Master Plan Projects is not a list of "shovel-ready" projects. It is simply a group of projects AMS believes most fully satisfy the requirements of the Vision and Principles, and help to satisfy the expressed needs of the cultural community.
The third component of the Master Plan is a Support Program designed to guide County funding decisions regarding support of facility projects. The Support Program defines a comprehensive process of qualification and evaluation, aided by a technical assistance program, with successful, well-planned projects eventually receiving County support for capital or operations funding, or both. AMS designed the Support Program within a "Framework for Decision-Making," developed earlier in the Master Plan process. The Framework, as it became known, attempted to express the "value" derived from any given facilities project as a combination of, and balance between, three sets of component values: Social, Economic, and Cultural. Social Value is made up of factors such as a project's capacity to create of a sense of community, engage the entire family, and enable arts education. Economic Value includes factors like a project's capacity to create jobs, contribute to long-term economic development, and generate multiplier-effect tax revenue. Cultural Value is made of factors such as a project's capacity to foster artistic innovation and support the cultural community. Taken together, the balance of factors present in any given project adds up to the project's Community Value. While it may be appropriate for a project to emphasize Economic Value over Cultural or Social values, the balance of all three must be right in each project for it to be appropriate for public support. Applying the Framework (along with the Vision and Principles) in developing the Support Program has led to a process that is, we believe, fair, inclusive, and objective.
As of this writing, the Cultural Facilities Master Plan is on a path towards formal County approval and implementation.