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Planning on the Cutting Edge Requires Fine Honing � What-If in Waupaca County

What is What-If?
What-If is a computer software program designed to help communities assess the pattern and consequences of their decisions on the land. What-If cannot make decisions by itself, but requires that local decision-makers (in Waupaca County, local plan commissioners) input their criteria into What-If. Relying on inputs made by plan commissioners, What-If drafts suitability and growth allocation maps. What-If does not predict the future, but instead can help local people understand what their community might be like, for example, if they:

• grow by 1,000 people

• expect urban infill

• want to protect lakes and streams

• prefer to grow at 1 house per 5 acres

• choose to grow near existing development, etc.

What-If is helping local commissions craft realistic and representative FLU maps that will be included in their comprehensive plans.

Tool Selection
What-If was selected as the tool of choice for the County�s process among two other tools, Community Viz and Place-It. What-If was ultimately chosen based on two major factors. First, planners hypothesized that What-If could better capture economies of scale. It was thought that a single model could be developed and applied individually in each community. Planners, however, were never able to capitalize on this theory within the existing budget and timeline. Instead, 34 models were created for each community and the county.

Second, the planning team sought to minimize the risks and costs associated with running the software live at the meetings. Running the software live meant that each professional facilitator (up to eight per regional meeting) would need to be fully trained and equipped with the software, laptops, and LCD projectors. The team was also cautious of software and hardware glitches and time to run scenarios live. As compared to the other two tools examined, What-If was better suited to running in a controlled environment. The team chose to develop worksheets that mimicked the software protocol. The worksheets were designed to be filled out by commissioners at the meetings and then brought back to the office to run the scenario. Under this strategy each facilitator required enough training to be familiar with What-If concepts, but only a few needed the capacity to run it.

Implementing What-If
What-If was implemented in three distinct stages: Education, Suitability Mapping, and Growth Allocation.

Education
Education was an extremely important stage in the Waupaca County process. Since the planning process was designed to be grassroots, education first needed to ensure local decision-makers that they, not the software, were in charge of decision-making. Commissioners were ensured that the resulting maps were a guide, not a definitive answer for the future allocation of local uses. Plan commissions were given the option to use, modify, or ignore the �What If� maps if they so chose.

Education was also needed to build the capacity of commissioners to use What-If effectively. Commissioners were not expected to run the software themselves, but were expected to understand how the software applied their inputs of land and demographic data. Building capacity began earlier in the process with commissioners verifying geographic and demographic data for accuracy. Verifying data helped commissioners become better informed about the data and how it could be applied. Educational brochures were also developed to help commissioners understand how What-If applied data in laymen terms. A portion of two meetings was used for educating commissioners about What-If.

Suitability Mapping
In May 2005 the What-If suitability mapping was launched in each of the 33 local towns, cities, and villages. Maps were developed to identify suitable lands for various future land uses including commercial, industrial, several densities of residential, agriculture, and forestry. Worksheets, developed by Foth and VanDyke, walked commissioners through the process in bite-sized chunks. The worksheets prompted each plan commission to complete four steps:

1. Identify which land uses you expect or want to see in the future.

2. Choose which existing land uses are available to develop into a future land use.

3. Rank land features, such as steep slopes, prime soils, etc. for their suitability to accommodate a future land use.

4. Rank the overall importance of a land feature to a future land use.

considered in the analysis. Levels of suitability were determined by how commissioners ranked and weighted individual land features in steps 3 and 4. Rankings and weightings assign a score to each area on the map, minus those in light grey. High scores, those shown in dark green, meant high suitability and a higher preference and probability it would develop to that future land use. Lower scores, those shown in lighter shades of green, meant low suitability and a lower preference for development in that area. Areas in white are areas that received a score of zero and were considered �not suitable� for development to some future land use.

Growth Allocation
The growth allocation module in What-If uses demographic information, preferences for densities, and previously developed suitability maps to allocate future land uses across a jurisdiction. The scores on the suitability maps define the probability of growth allocation. High scoring areas are areas where future growth will likely be allocated, low scoring areas are less likely, and not suitable areas are not considered in the allocation process. Many communities developed growth allocation maps with What-If late in 2005 and early 2006. To mimic the What-If protocol and walk commissioners through the process, Foth and VanDyke again developed a worksheet. The worksheet prompted communities to select:

1. Housing and population projections

2. Plan commission approved suitability maps

3. Housing types

4. Housing density

5. Demand for redevelopment and infill

6. Demand for land preservation (meaning the addition of agriculture or forestry)

of land before 2030! This meant that they had to make tradeoffs (i.e. forfeit preservation goals or increase housing density).

Results
Communities are now on their way to using What-If to help create their preferred FLU maps. What-If has shown both benefits and shortcomings.

Decisions Based on Good Information
The strongest evidence of the benefits of What-If to the process is that decisions made by commissions were based on good information and sound methods. What-If relies on both spatial and demographic information. Spatial data were collected from various sources and checked by commissioners for spatial and attribute accuracy. Population, housing, and employment projects were also applied. Public preferences could also be applied with What-If (i.e. preferred housing densities). In addition, community goals and objectives always accompanied the use of What-If so that commissioners remained cognizant to use What-If to achieve their communities� vision.

As compared to traditional mapping methods that utilize hardcopy maps and markers, What-If provided results that were more transparent, more objective, and more measurable. Results were more transparent because someone coming from outside the process could trace back, using the What-If reports, to see what information was used and how the commissions applied it to arrive at an approved map. The process was more objective in that criteria defined by the commissions were evenly applied across the entire jurisdiction. Criteria, defined by the plan commission, could not be applied in some areas and not others. Because What-If is run on a Geographical Information System platform, the process is more measurable. The locations and extents of future land uses could be measured and matched to demographic data and community preferences. Commissioners knew how much land was allocated in each scenario.

Enhanced Public Participation
What-If was applied at over 15 public cluster meetings and over 99 public local meetings. Hundreds of plan commissioners and members of the public were present. Prior to applying What-If, commissioners were responsible to review goals and objectives that represented the visions of their communities. At the time What-If was launched, commissioners were ready to migrate into hands-on decision-making activities. They wanted to start making decisions that meant something on the map.

Discussions and decisions that affect the map are inherently political decisions. They are not based on just factual information alone, but also include political and social realities. What-If helped to facilitate these political discussions. Commissioners were responsible to choose spatial factors that would identify places on the landscape that met social goals. What-If offered a platform that enabled commissioners to systematically consider and rank land features for their suitability for a future land use.

Limited Suitability Analyses
The version of What-If applied at the time limited the process to just ten suitability factors, such as surface waters, wetlands, slopes, roads, soils, etc. This limitation meant that only ten data choices could be ranked for scoring the suitability of a future land use. The process in Waupaca County had identified over 30 suitability factors. The facilitation team was forced to combine factors if these data were to be used. For example, wetlands were combined with floodplains into a single data set. Combining data, however, meant that commissioners could not make individual choices based on wetlands or floodplains alone. This limitation perhaps led to suitability maps that were less than representative of community preferences.
Controlled Environment Limited Understanding
Running What-If in a controlled environment, instead of live, proved confusing to some commissioners. First, without seeing a map change as they made their decisions on the worksheets, commissioners had a difficult time understanding the implications. Afterwards, completed worksheets were taken to the office and input into What-If to create maps. The completed maps were brought back to the communities two months after filling out worksheets. Commissioners had a difficult time relating the resulting maps back to the decisions they made two months earlier. This difficulty, however, cannot be attributed to the software, but to how the software was applied by the process.

Conclusion
Ultimately, planners found that What-If was fully capable, if not always flexible, of addressing the spatial planning tasks of suitability and growth allocation mapping. Overall, planning with What-If can be credited with success. With it, commissioners were able to make decisions transparently, objectively, and more measurably. What-If also helped foster an inherently political discussion among commissioners � where and how to accommodate development yet achieve other community goals that compete for the same land. Manual methods could not achieve results like these.

Implementing What-If wasn�t without its challenges. Some challenges are attributed to the software. What-If only supported a portion of data desired and didn�t achieve the economies of scale that the hired consultant had hoped for. Other challenges are attributed to the users. What-If could be applied more effectively as users learned the ins and outs of the software. Planners were also able to assess their public participation protocol to understand that running the software in a controlled environment has its risks.  

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