(cheerful music) >>What are cities and towns?

They're corporations.

They're corporations like any other corporation.

Every great organization has a plan and local governments should be no exception.

>>The role of a planner is to see the big picture, yet also see the minutia.

>>Hi, everyone.

You rarely can make everybody happy in this job.

That's why I always say I'm professional at making people mad at me.

(laughs) >>It feels like writing a continual research paper, but while people are poking you.

>>We're consistently problem solving.

I'm trying to write this comp plan, but at the same time there are real-time things that are happening.

This isn't going as planned.

Where do we go from here?

>>There are urban planning schools, but they teach you urban planning.

No one teaches rural planning.

>>In general, when you think of development, you don't really think of, hey, we're gonna have one house here and then 30 acres over there.

We have another house and that's it.

That doesn't really feel like development to a lot of people.

>>When you're talking land use planning, you always get back to the land and the impact that it has on the people that live in it.

>>If you just turn right here.

>>This thing?

Oh.

>>Planning, it is really about relationships and talking with people and knowing your community and knowing what they want.

I'm trying to create dialogue and to get them to think of the other perspective.

>>You're Donny.

>>Yes, representation.

>>Especially in a smaller town, it's really cool to feel like you have the possibility to create some change.

>>You have the power as a resident in your community to help shape that little corner of the world.

You have the power.

♪ In the heart land ♪ ♪ We rely on ourselves and one another ♪ ♪ Hand in hand, we must stand ♪ ♪ In the heart land ♪ >>Production funding for "Life in the Heart Land" was provided by the Chrisman Family Foundation and by.

>>And as a kid, I was always playing with Lego.

The Titanic obviously is the centerpiece of the office.

I'd build a little Lego city and put little lights inside the buildings and we had a little Lego train that would run around the room and I would turn all the lights off and sit on the sofa and just watch the little city moving around.

You know, at the time, not knowing that planning was a career.

In some ways when we put together plans for communities, I sometimes kind of think about a Lego instruction manual, make sure that they have all the pieces they need and they know exactly how to put it together.

(gentle music) >>Planning feels so invisible.

I remember growing up and think about like, how does like anything happen?

I see houses going up, I see them working on the roads, like who's doing all this?

>>What we do shapes the buildings, where the roads go, sidewalks, utilities, the number of bars in your cell phone.

That's the zoning.

So many aspects of our day to day life.

>>I feel like as planners we are sometimes in the public eye because we're presenting during public hearings, but you don't really know who they are and what they do on a daily basis, but there's a lot that goes into planning more than just the plan.

My name is Julia Hensley and I'm a planner II with Augusta County.

How do you do this without bending it?

Ben we'll show you how it's done.

With planning, we're super creative in terms of our titles.

You've got planner I, which is an entry-level position, planner II is a step above that.

It's good to know people.

(laughs) You never know what shoes you're gonna need.

Like those, there's muddy boots 'cause that was a solar site I believe that we were on.

You gotta have your tennis shoes.

You gotta have, you know, flats, you gotta have boots, you gotta have heels.

You just don't know on any given day.

(gentle music) My intention in getting a degree in psychology was to help people, and so once I found planning, it kind of felt like this epiphany of I can help people on kind of a grandiose large scale.

>>Yeah.

A lot of my professional background is in anti-human trafficking efforts, and when you see what variables contribute to that, that led me into housing and community development and then planning.

>>You have one new- >>Yes.

My two younger brothers and sister owned 25 acres.

They're along Wayne Avenue and I never had the chance to ask them.

>>I love my job.

It's tough, but I love it.

And then the third one is, developer will install turn lanes as warranted.

>>And we have to update all the files.

>>Yep.

Oh my god, there's so many files.

>>There's so many files.

>>Kaitlyn and I are very different.

She's the yin to my yang.

I need her to like balance me out.

I'm gonna head to the conference room.

>>Okay, oh shoot, I need to go too.

>>I know, girl.

>>Get my jacket.

In a lot of more urban localities, you have maybe a team of 20, 25 different planners and you can be extremely specialized.

Here in the county, you kind of have to be a jack of all trades.

>>If you're in a rural area, you have to be a little bit of like a Swiss army knife.

A small package that does a lot of different things.

>>Rural localities don't really have the tax base, they don't have the staff.

The planner will also be the zoning administrator, also will do economic development, tourism.

>>The blessing and the curse of working in the small town is you wear a lot of hats.

So good thing is you don't have a lot of bureaucracy to go through 'cause it's typically the same person does four different jobs.

>>There was only one of me for a long time.

This is where rural planning caucus gets its members from all over as well as some from West Virginia and North Carolina.

The main planning organizations in the state weren't really addressing those rural concerns.

>>A lot of the planning conferences out there really focused on cities.

It was like Norfolk, Richmond, Northern Virginia.

>>Somewhere between 1976 and 19- >>'79, I think?

>>'79.

A group of rural planners from different jurisdictions around the state started to talk to each other.

>>And so they said, "Hey, why don't we get together and we'll do our own thing?"

>>I ended up getting elected to the board at that first conference and I've never gotten off.

(both laugh) >>And Sharon's gonna manage the agenda.

Did we say that?

>>Okay, so we've got a basic list.

Housing data centers, AI ethics, grant funding sources, FEMA VDM.

>>My big beef is medical.

We have all these folks coming in, all this development, and just a total lack of medical resources.

You cannot get a doctor's appointment.

>>But I'm met with issues with cell service, right?

I talked to a guy a few weeks ago who came in and said that he, during a heart attack, drove himself down the road so he could call.

>>My uncle did that.

>>What rural communities are trying to accomplish is inherently different than like a city.

To have the baseline knowledge that you need to be successful, you need to stay up on state legislation, you need to stay up on overall legal issues and court cases.

>>All right, all in favor?

>>Aye.

>>All opposed?

All right.

>>And that's a huge task for these local governments.

You have a call list a mile long and a big stack of files on their desk that they have to process.

>>2289 recovery residences.

>>If this passes, all of this will need to be re-codified in our ordinance during the comprehensive plan process.

A comprehensive plan is a very high level guide for development and growth in a locality.

This is the comprehensive plan that was adopted in April of 2007.

Every five or 10 years, we do an update, issues that we think are going to be upcoming over the next 20 years.

>>You've got your comprehensive plan at, say, the 30,000-foot elevation.

>>It's not just coming up with a bunch of goals.

The comprehensive plan really should be a technical process as well.

We listen to the community and then we work together to figure out what is the best path forward for our housing, for our land use, for our transportation.

It all starts there.

>>Looking like a crazy person.

Make it strong this time.

It's tricky because if you build it, they will come.

We're set to grow by about 12,000 people from now until 2050.

We're looking at the inevitability of growth, but then looking at the fact that we wanna maintain rural character, rural charm, and preserve agriculture.

It's 10:30, but maybe we could give a couple minutes.

What can be frustrating is the amount of money that is required in order to actualize things that you know are needed.

>>If it's $100,000, you can squeak that out of budget.

But when you start talking millions, you've got to plan carefully.

>>The budget is forever the blanket that isn't big enough to cover your feet or your shoulders and you just have to decide what you can actually do.

We wanted to renovate the bathrooms in Gypsy Hill Park and Montgomery Hall and our estimate for how much that probably should cost was like 250,000, 275,000.

We only got one bid for $895,000.

Well, I guess it's not time to do that.

>>We had these obstacles, we had these gaps, we had the bridge, and we don't have a lot of funding to do it.

>>Without grant money, without Virginia Department of Transportation grant money, the town by itself not gonna be able to develop public facilities.

>>We've done almost all of that with grant funding.

We couldn't do these expensive transportation related stuff without it.

It's coming from the state or federal in most cases and being redistributed back into town.

Grants aren't easy.

The application part's probably the simplest part and that's not a cake by any means, but then once you get it you have to manage it.

But that's how we've survived.

We took some hard times.

You know, a lot of towns have.

>>In the early 2000, downtown, just like everywhere else is dying.

>>Vinton by itself is always been kind of considered a bedroom community to Roanoke.

Downtown functioned and operated in support of those residents.

Then when they could jump online and buy whatever they needed, those stores become empty.

If you didn't live here, there was no need to come to downtown Vinton.

>>We are like, "Okay, we need to do something."

So we started looking at what we can do strategically for the next 20 years to address dying downtown.

>>Was this our first crosswalk in town?

>>I think so.

>>Roanoke County was considering rebuilding a new library.

Someone smart suggested, well, let's put it in downtown and maybe that would drive some traffic in a positive way.

So the town purchased the property, the county built the building.

>>The actual design, including the color of the brick and stuff like that was done by our community members.

>>When you have the media labs here, you have some free space upstairs.

You have some patio rooms out back.

>>I think we have the prettiest library but I'm a little biased.

(laughs) >>We've got a template investing in place, investing in public spaces that not just that owner or that tenant can benefit from, but the whole town.

When I was growing up, Vinton was home but it was not a place where you would go linger.

>>I been here for 29 plus years.

I worked for federal planning in Malaysia before I became the town planner.

It's been very challenging, very interesting seeing things happen.

>>I've been working on a hotel on the corner and that's been going on for nine years since I got here.

I don't know that the town nine years ago would've said, "Well okay, let's give it nine years."

You don't set out for that, but sometimes it takes that long.

>>People get frustrated with how slow government moves.

Really the constitution is written to make things move slow.

It's intentional because the decisions we make affect everybody, and the last thing we want to do is go the wrong direction, to steer the ship the wrong way.

It's not just a bad day at work, it's a bad decade for a community because the wrong policies were adopted and it can put a community in completely the wrong direction.

>>I grew up in Uniontown till I was probably 14.

We was always called the country part of Staunton, which I liked.

We loved the summertime because summertime we had every fruit that you can think of.

You know, we had about seven, eight cherry trees, apple trees, pear trees, peach trees.

I mean, we had a field day and we could walk the neighborhood.

Our neighborhood was safe.

You're looking at a family community.

If you did something wrong, the neighbor gonna whoop your butt, your mama gonna whoop your butt.

But they looked out for you.

Uniontown used to be a thriving, small, African American community.

>>So much of this hadn't been surveyed in years.

>>Yeah, in generations.

>>Decades, yeah.

>>We got most of Uniontown in 1948.

We ended up zoning it officially industrial in 1968.

>>My uncle built a house down there, right after he built this house, they rezoned it.

>>An active neighborhood got zoned industrial.

That was what made it like cut flowers in a vase.

They don't know they're dead.

>>Daddy owns that house, this house, this area right here.

You can't get permits and you're not able to finance anything because the banks won't lend you money because of how it's zoned.

So it was a spiral.

>>You could not build another house there 'cause well it's industrial.

You don't build a house in industrial zoning.

>>My son has a house down there now that nobody's in.

They stopped him from putting his roof back on.

They said, oh well, you can't make any corrections in your home.

And the change, it became a dying community.

>>It was really full of homes.

I think it was up to 65, 70 homes.

>>You got five families left that were there when we grew up.

That's it.

>>I mean, a lot of these things just are moving parts that happen beyond anyone's sight.

>>Everybody has a hidden agenda.

>>Historically it was very difficult for black people to buy land and keep it and I appreciate the fact that 100 later, we still own it.

Whatever policies that were originally initiated to create this area, those policies worked exactly like they were designed to do.

That system is still in place, and this is still America, this is still the south, and this is gonna happen.

>>In theory and your aspiration of planning is always about what does the public want.

But historically planning has been a tool to devalue people and not treat them as equal.

When planning works the way it should work, you never hear about it.

That's what makes it scary 'cause you don't know.

>>A lot of it is trying to fix what others did previously.

Trying to make sure that you're not going to have the same negative impacts on future generations, that decisions that were made in the '30s or '40s have on the current day.

>>Maybe if we had done things differently at the end of the civil war, we wouldn't have this.

>>A lot of needs of the moment shape things that end up being permanent.

It's really interesting looking at Department of Transportation studies about how many horses there were gonna be by 1950s and what a huge problem dealing with their waste was gonna be.

And that shaped our cities tremendously.

>>We need to understand how we got here.

We need to understand that historical context so that we can look forward.

There is precedent for local governments to manage development that goes back to the colonial era.

1666.

So you can go way back.

There was the fire in London.

The laws that governed the construction of new buildings were not enforced.

It really ravages the entire city.

After that fire in 1666, you had the first modern building codes.

Unfortunately we didn't learn all the lessons we should have.

In 1871, the Chicago fire ravages across the city of Chicago.

1904, we have the great fire in Baltimore.

1906, we have the fire in San Francisco.

In 1911, you have the Shirtwaist fire.

The backdrop here is just American cities going through these enormous tragedies.

So in 1916, you have the first comprehensive zoning ordinance in New York City.

You have all these black swan events that happen to communities and I do wonder as we look back on what was happening in LA with the fires, what happened in western North Carolina with Helene as it came through.

We're gonna start seeing that pressure again of rethinking how we manage communities in the face of these growing challenges.

(gentle music) >>Our original goal was to start the plan in September of 2023 and to have it finished in December of 2024.

And that did not happen.

We ended up having to part ways with a consultant.

Everything fell on two people.

>>You also need to be doing tables if we're doing the scope of work?

>>We have a biweekly meeting that we do with county admin to kind of check in and so the last one was really fun 'cause they're like, we were supposed to have the first draft like the second week of February and there's no way.

And it felt like your dad was disappointed in you and you're like, oh, like, I don't like this feeling of somebody being like, "You should be done with that already."

Yeah, it's harder than you would think.

>>I mean, it's a whole system.

>>So when the plan to plan goes awry, you have to pivot.

That is sometimes a difficult thing to deal with, you know, because you understand the need and you can't speed up time.

It either takes the time that it takes or it doesn't happen.

>>You know, this is serious business.

It's not a game.

The decisions made here, the policies, the regulations, this can affect whether someone can afford a home or whether someone is evicted from a home.

The story of planning is a long one and it's filled with stories of villains and heroes and intrigue and tragedy and there's been a lot of wrongs done under this mantle of planning.

>>I guess I'm just amazed sometimes that we don't have these conversations, because somewhere in there, the truth about where we are is hidden and we as a nation will never heal, we will never grow until that stuff is acknowledged and dealt with.

I'm looking forward to seeing a vibrant black community in Staunton.

I believe that it's possible.

>>A lot of the comp plan is a guess.

Someone's proactive and someone's reactive.

Sometimes we have to look back at it and say, but why?

>>In a democracy, people need to be involved 'cause the plans are always better when everyone's involved.

>>This is our introduction to local politics in Staunton.

>>I'm really interested in municipalism and just sort of creating change at the local level.

>>America is made up of communities, a bunch of communities altogether.

Just get to work one by one.

>>Hello, Anita.

>>This will be our first committee meeting for the Vinton Comp Plan 2050.

So today we hope to hear from the citizens as what they like to see the town in 2050.

>>I think the impatient part of it is the hard part.

Things take time.

I wish I could get there quicker because I've seen what the last 10 years have resulted.

>>The plan has worked for 20 some years now.

It's time to see where we want to go for the next 20 years.

I plan to be mayor another 20 years, so.

(laughs) >>20 years is a long time, but it's also kind of a blip on the radar screen.

>>Good morning, everybody.

You've probably noticed the cameras.

That's to document that you're not sleeping, so we can send that footage to your county administrators.

>>Everyone's trying to improve their community.

Everyone has similar problems.

>>We only learn by making mistakes, but it's good to be able to hear what other people have made mistakes so maybe you don't go down that same path.

>>Yeah, we can learn more better.

>>Yeah.

>>Our plans for planning.

Hey, good morning, how are you?

>>Yes, we've got you.

Did you get your hat?

Oh my goodness, there you go.

>>Adorable, thank you.

>>People, whether they disagreed with you or not, whether they're yelling at you or whether they pat you on the back, they've got a story to tell.

Listen to it and learn from it.

(gentle music) >>We disagree a lot.

I would argue conflict's good.

We should have conflict, we should disagree, we should get in arguments.

It just needs to be positive conflict, not demeaning each other.

>>The thing just for me.

And I have my day and I have my week.

>>When you finish a plan, you haven't reached the finish line.

You've got to the start line.

Then the real work begins.

>>Comp plan this morning.

This is afternoon.

>>Yep.

>>Monday, start again.

>>Yep.

>>Cool.

>>People hold society together.

I think we live for each other.

>>So I wanted to offer this perspective that I have today and hope that it can contribute to creating the world that I wanna see.

>>Production funding for "Life in the Heart Land" was provided by the Chrisman Family Foundation and by.

♪ Babbling brook reminds us flowing holy ♪ ♪ Plow the earth and plant and eat ♪ ♪ Watch your children grow ♪ ♪ Day breaks into nightfall ♪ ♪ Soon we're reaping all we've sown ♪ ♪ And who belongs ♪ ♪ Is it you or is it me ♪ ♪ Is there room ♪ ♪ In our hearts for this whole land ♪ ♪ Is there room ♪ ♪ For us in the heart of the land ♪ (gentle music)