Community Visioning Open House - Summary

At the Open Houses held on Thursday, March 23, 2023 and on Saturday, March 25, 2023 community members participated in input activities to understand opportunities and constraints from the community's point of view in the study area. The input activities included the following:

INPUT ACTIVITIES

1) One Thing to Keep and One Thing to Remove Activity Tables

This activity helped determine the most important desires of the community by asking: “If you could keep only one aspect of the northeast Denton area, what would it be? And if you could remove one aspect of the northeast Denton area, what would it be?” Participants wrote their thoughts on a sticky note.

2) Front Page Headlines Activity Table

This activity asked community members to write on a sticky note a newspaper headline about Northeast Denton in 2050.

3) Vision Boards Activity Table

This activity helped the community members picture the future vision for the area. Participants used red and green dots to indicate the images they can envision or cannot envision in the Northeast area.

4) Opportunities and Constraints Activity Table

Participants used markers to show opportunities and constraints – areas that should be areas of focus for change. These could include dangerous intersections, proposed park space, new trails, good locations for shopping, historical areas to be preserved, informal gathering areas, vacant property that could be better used, wider (or smaller) streets needed, etc.

5) Six Word Story Activity Table

The Six-Word Story encouraged participants to be creative while providing telling information about the core sentiment of their experience of a place. The Six-Word Story attempts to distill a person’s experience or narrative into a short, evocative story. This is an exercise in brevity while conveying meaning and substance. Example: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Participants write their six-word story on sticky notes and add them to the wall.

6) Discussion Table

This table provided participants an avenue for additional discussions with more detail and a broader range of topics. Questions from the online survey prompted discussion with community members

7) Children’s Area

This activity encouraged children to be part of the conversation shaping Northeast Denton’s future. The creative activity asked children to envision the future they want.

OPEN HOUSE SUMMARY

At the first Community Visioning Open House there were 168 participants that attended the event. At the second Open House there were 97 participants that attended. Below is a summary of what we heard from the community:

Newspaper headline in 2050

• Rural Country Living Character
• Outdoor Recreational Greenspaces
• Preserve Hartlee Field
• Low Density Residential
• Protect/ Conserve Natural Systems
• No More Apartments
• Control Developments
• Road resurfacing – Cooper Creek Road
• Change back to pre 2000 vision
• Compromise through input that all parties are content with

One thing to KEEP in NE Denton

• Open space, trees, greenbelts
• Keep zoning “as is”
• Low density rural development
• Keep Hartlee Field Road a rural cross section
• Farms & cattle
• Hartlee Field Airstrip & hangars

One thing to REMOVE from NE Denton

• Apartments
• Traffic
• Mixed use development/density
• PD zoning/ tract homes
• Traffic safety measures
• Future growth
• Homeless
• Planning & Zoning Commission
• Junk yards not in use
• Woodhaven Mobile Homes

For more summary details refer to Phase 1 | Public Engagement Feedback Summary PowerPoint under Important Documents.