Who: NewAllen Alliance
What: NewAllen Alliance presentation of planning results and concept submission for funding capital investment projects in the seven communities in East Allen County.
Where: Grand Wayne Center
When: Thursday, December 15th at 8am
The NewAllen Alliance in partnership with Kristi Sturtz of Sturtz PMG, will present the plans for the member communities from a yearlong planning process that was paid for by the Capital Improvement Board in October 2015. The presentation will be this Thursday, December 15th at the CIB regular meeting at 8am at the Grand Wayne Center. The presentation will include a plan that includes individualized goals for each community and highlight commonalities between the seven communities’ projects.
The second half of the presentation will be for the formal submission of a concept letter for projects totaling $4,923.002 to be invested into six communities with the use of local and private dollars for capital investment needs along with CIB support. The proposal will ask the Capital Improvement Board to set aside $2,447,997 for these projects as they are further planned and executed over the 2017 calendar year.
“We are excited about the momentum we have going and the collaboration that we have seen in the last year among all seven communities in East Allen County. The planning grant from the CIB gave our communities a real focusing point on how we can work better together and dream bigger.” Said Kent Castleman, President of the NewAllen Alliance.
The planning process included Sturtz and leaders of NewAllen working with a small planning group (3-5 members) from each community which folded into a 45-member oversight committee, organizing over 25 community meetings to seek public input, interviewing 40 stakeholders, receiving 800 survey responses and a final launch event in October of this year in which over 120 attended to hear the next steps.
Another output of the planning process was the creation of a website where future collaboration and implementation stories can be shared. That website is at www.newallenalliance.org. Each individual community plan, their top project choices and demographic information can be found on the website.
An interesting fact that was learned in the process is the East Allen County has around 56,000 residents, which is larger than the population of 65 of 92 Indiana counties.
For more information, contact Kent Castleman at 260-348-2973 or kentcastleman
NewAllen Alliance Website: www.newallenalliance.org can provide historical information and the plans.
