EP 80: Comprehensive Planning in an Age of Change
When a city's or town's governing board adopts a comprehensive plan -- a big document meant to guide or manage growth and other elements of the locality's future -- it's a pretty big deal. Sure, municipalities across North Carolina have them, with insistence from state law. But for an individual city or town, it's a tremendous feat to complete such an intensive product in its purpose and sensitivity for the community, requiring all kinds of self-awareness work, public involvement, math, predictions, visioneering (the "blue sky" versus the real and practical) and, of course, time investment. On this episode of Municipal Equation, the podcast from the North Carolina League of Municipalities about cities and towns and how we shape them, we talk with a number of officials about how they view and pursue comprehensive planning guides, and how that might be changing with time. Philosophies, ideas for public engagement and inclusion, and plenty of other takeaways make this episode a solid one in the ongoing conversation of ever-improving and protecting the places we call home. // Municipal Equation is a publication of the N.C. League of Municipalities, https://www.nclm.org. Contact host/producer Ben Brown at bbrown@nclm.org.
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Transcript
From the North Carolina League of Municipalities, this is Municipal Equation, a podcast about cities and towns. Hello and welcome. This is Ben Brown, and this is a new series of episodes of Municipal Equation from the North Carolina League of Municipalities. This podcast started back in, I think, 2016 and covered lots and lots of ground as something meant to connect a general listening audience with the kinds of work, issues, trends, challenges, and cool ideas in the space of cities and towns, municipalities, city halls, and how we run them. Now with Municipal Equation rebooting it kind of, we're we're getting closer with the audience, kind of zooming in on on on the people most involved with this kind of work, which is to say the members of the league in the context of this podcast, the the mayors, council members, commissioners, aldermen, what have you, and the staffers at city hall that help to keep things going and help bring new things to life. And there's a lot to talk about, lots of emerging and evolving issues out there, opportunities to implement ideas and solutions, and we're gonna hear a lot of that on municipal equation again. Idea sharing and philosophies and other thoughts on the issues that cities and towns are facing in different ways and what we might do about them. And now I haven't done a poll, but just going from experience, if you if you ask the leaders of all the cities and towns in North Carolina to put the biggest issue they're facing into one word, you'll hear a good number of them say the word growth. Not necessarily everybody will, but growth is going to be a popular answer. And I thought we could start off the new series of Municipal Equation. Technically, it's episode 80, but we're kind of refreshing things here. I thought we could start off with a look at how municipal governments are satisfying a requirement on the growth front with the members of their communities, maybe somewhat of an uncommon opportunity to get together and interact and figure out things together. What I'm talking about is something all the communities do, but they make it their own in a variety of ways and styles. I'm talking about comprehensive plans. I guess this episode was kind of inspired by different emails I've seen lately from different municipalities about the status of or adoption of their comprehensive plan. And each time it's in a it's in a pretty upbeat manner. When I get the press release from a city hall about a certain milestone that they've hit with the development of their comprehensive plan, often with a lot of emphasis put into how the residents of that city have already helped to shape this plan from a variety of angles and how this document is going to guide us through the future that's forecast for us. I mean, it's it's sort of a proud thing, I guess, when a municipality gets to to put one of these comprehensive plans together, something they can make with the residents of their town in a context where otherwise maybe the work of the city planning office isn't the first thing on the minds of these folks. So I reached out to a few municipalities that I knew were somewhere in the process of comprehensive planning, whether updating an old one or drafting a new one first of its kind or just towns that were somewhere in the process and to learn about how they're doing it. What's changed from past approaches? Maybe how you do actually get residents involved when substantial participation in government is generally speaking always kind of a challenge to inspire and so on just to learn more about how cities and towns are doing it. And it resulted in some pretty interesting conversations that reveal the increasing number of ways that town halls are working to reach out to their residents.
It was exciting to see the positive momentum and feedback we we received from the community members. My name is Susil Nepal. I'm the director of planning and development in city of High Point.
Where is High Point when it comes to comprehensive planning? Do you guys have one adopted? Are you working on one? Where where are you guys with, with that?
So, we are working on on our very first comprehensive plan. Actually, the city had what you what you generally refer to, land use plan, and it's pretty common in North Carolina communities. So that's what we had. I think, I believe it was adopted in two thousands. So over the past several years, that that was basically utilized as your vision and directive for future growth in terms of land uses and and helping with rezonings. So this is this is actually our first attempt to to create your traditional, what you call the comprehensive plan that goes beyond just the land uses, but also works with the community, your your elected, and all the stakeholders to create create a vision for how how do we grow in the next twenty, thirty years.
That was Sushil Nepal. He is with the city of High Point. Let's hear from the town of Garner.
And I'm Jeff Triesenberg. I'm the planning director for the town of Garner. So we've actually gotten through to adoption. It was actually adopted, I think, back in November or December, and, but it we did so with an effective date, last month in mid February. So just to give us a little bit of time to prepare for using the new document. So, yeah, we have we have finished, the process for this go around, and we have the new plan on the books.
We're also going to hear from the town of Davidson.
So my name is Trey Akers. I'm a principal planner with the town of Davidson planning department. So Davidson's planning history in a nutshell, it started in the the early nineties when Davidson was a small town and small college town, home to Davidson College, about 20 miles north of Charlotte. And in those days, it really was 20 miles North Of Charlotte, and it felt a world away. Trey said that started to change in the early nineteen nineties with growth coming in, and that Davidson as a community started to talk about the need for a plan. Who they would be in the face of the change that was anticipated to to come to the Charlotte region over the next twenty, thirty years. So they undertook a a land the general plan in 1993, a land plan in 1995, and then followed up with their first planning ordinance in 2001. So you had some smaller vision plans in the nineties and then a set of rules in 2001. It wasn't until 2010 that Davidson undertook its first comprehensive plan, kind of a big overarching policy document with a really long term vision in place. Our 2020 plan, which we started working on in 2018 and it was adopted in January 2020, is an update to the 2010 plan, although it is physically a different document. So we didn't just go into the 2010 plan and make changes. We did a wholesale new document for the 2020 plan.
In Garner, a growing town just outside of Raleigh, there was already a comprehensive plan on the books in 2018. But a few years into it, there was talk of giving that plan an update to clarify definitions and things of that sort to prevent any misinterpretations
of what it was saying. Different communities and different kinds of businesses and so on had different perspectives on the terminology used. For example And really came up with the concept that we've got to add some language in our our comprehensive plan to really make sure that we're all using the same vocabulary and we're using it the same way. John Hodges, and I'm one of the assistant town managers. So we we took that to council, and and it resonated with council enough that they were willing to to let us embark on what we thought was going to be just, writing an addendum to our comp plan. We realized there's a lot more than just definitions that we really need to rethink. By then, our community was growing so fast compared to the growth we were seeing when we started the previous plan that was adopted in '18, but we started the work in '16. So as we started doing that work, and Jeff was leading that with our consultant, we really realized that, hey. This is bigger than just an addendum to the comp plan, and we really just need to rewrite our entire comp plan if we want to incorporate all the many different things that we're hearing our council and our community as a part of their vision for the community.
Well, so mentioning different, different voices and different ideas and getting people on the same page of, you know, just just from the outside sounds like a a huge challenge. You know? Sometimes it's difficult to get people's engagement with with government and local government to begin with. But but, you know, really trying to kinda sort out differing maybe mindsets on on what our character is and what's right for it and so on. You you might have to talk to a lot of different people or or get a lot of people in the same room to have that conversation. How how was that how was that done? How was that approach, how did you, try to engage with different, groups of people who might have the right kind of input for a plan like this? Well, I think one thing that we did differently
this time around, even though we ended up rewriting it, it wasn't like we threw the entire baby out with the bathwater. This again is Jeff Triesenberg, planning director for the town of Garner. Yeah. Our our new consulting team still relied very heavily on a lot of that public input input process that occurred back in 2016 to 2018, but we still did more of that traditional public outreach, you know, through community meetings and workshops and and the like. But the new consultant did come in and had spent, I think, a week's worth of of time in in talking with stakeholder groups that we kinda helped facilitate as staff, get them in touch with critical players, so to speak, in town, as well as, you know, just average citizens, some of whom had been involved in the last process and some of them that were new.
So they already had some fairly recent public input data to work with, but they gathered more anyway. And because they detected differences in how the community regarded the plan and its terminology, all members of the planning commission and the city council were more directly involved this time. So it really allowed us to have more meaningful and thorough discussions
around these issues that we were having, you know, seeing a disconnect as far as interpretations of terms and and concepts that were presented within the plan. So there's a kind of a combination of, you know, traditional public outreach, but then retooling, particularly the steering committee, and making sure that we had all the folks there at the table who have direct involvement with interpreting and applying the plan.
I asked Trey with the town of Davidson how they handle that, incorporating different kinds of community voices so their plan could be well rounded and commonly understood. Part of getting there was looking at what other cities had tried with community engagement. We looked at some of their public engagement tactics where they actually
deemphasized folks coming to town hall, and they wanted to get people's feedback in the community. And so we largely built our public engagement strategy around not people coming to town hall, but us going out into the community where people were. So at the farmers markets or at college athletic events, at HOA meetings that were underway. But we also did have a few targeted stakeholder groups that we wanted to reach as well. We have an increasingly, aging population in Davidson. And so we had meetings specific for those folks. We have several different minority groups in Davidson well as well. And so we we had hosted specific events for those groups. And, you know, each group has its own needs. So the time of day you're having the meeting, what you're offering at the meeting. Are you offering food? Are you offering childcare? Are you offering
translation services as well? Those are things that are possible barriers or or maybe opportunities that will bring people out. Trey said the town of Davidson was able to keep up on how they were doing in terms of community inclusion by weighing participation data against demographics research the town had already done. And so we had a demographic profile for our community
and visual graphics that showed the different age groups, the different, ethnic groups that comprised our community. And we use that to inform the types of events we designed, but then also to check who was attending these events and reporting. If people were willing to share that information, which many of them were, we then compiled it in a database on the back end to to double check. Hey. Our our minority population for this group is at 8%. We've only had 4% participation in this band of public engagement. How do we how do we get to 8% so we have more of a representative sample? And so we would go back out in the community with different events, try different things. In Garner, John Hodges said a better community inclusion tactic for his town included rethinking
what the local government was asking its residents when it came to feedback on a long term community wide plan like this. When we went out to the public, we went out with a very different ask of them this time. It was take a look at this and tell us how this looks and feels versus, hey. Can you read these chapters and send us some commentary if you have any thought? It was a very it was designed to be a very different looking comprehensive plan. So it went from a 98 page comprehensive plan into a 262 page plan, and most of what added to that plan were the use of graphics to represent the concepts that were described in textual form in the comprehensive plan. One of the things we observed in the 2018 plan is it meant it meant a great deal to our planning staff who used it every day. It it was a fairly good guide to administrative folks like me in the manager's office. We thought council understood it, but we even probably at adoption realized that the citizens didn't really probably understand a lot of what was in it. And so so we took a completely different approach to what the plan was gonna look like and working focusing heavily on graphics to represent the concepts so that when we did go out and get the pub ask for the public input, there was something much more visual and much more real world for them to react to.
In High Point, the creation of their first comprehensive plan of this kind started back in January 2023, also with diligent community inclusion. At the time of this recording, the city was getting close to adoption and had just recently unveiled its public draft of the plan. Sushil Nepal said a lot of the community was there for the unveiling.
In in a presentation, where we had, like, over 200 folks attend and and listen to the public draft, what what we we were very proud to call it, unveiling event. And to receive that kind of feedback and presents from the community members to hear about, comprehensive plan, that was great. That was a great turnout. It's always a challenge to find a way to engage and and also sustain that engagement throughout the process from from communities, members when when you talk about comprehensive plan. Every community is different. There are some communities, where you'll find folks are very engaged in this kind of, activities, and in some, they are not. And and and there will be some some in the middle. So we we had we were very proud of the amount of engagement we we received in High Point. It was cool for some of the residents in attendance too, and that those who participated previously got to see their feedback incorporated into the draft plan that was just unveiled. So folks could see if they came in a very first public event, what did they say and how did that get carried over? Matter of fact, lot of folks that came at that unveiling event, they were very proud to see some of the things they said. And and people get excited when they see their fingerprints.
Sushil said they did multiple open houses with different kinds of exercises participate and communicate their priorities. They also took feedback and input online. Another thing the city of High Point did, which a lot of communities do in different ways, is set up a steering committee to help guide the process and give advice. What we did for the steering committee is I think we did pretty unique compared to
some of the other communities. And I've I've done comprehensive plan in different communities, and I've utilized different different processes. So what we did here was rather than picking and choosing folks that serve on the steering committee, we made a decision working with working with our leadership is we're gonna solicit publicly. We we put out public call for folks to serve on the steering committee of the comprehensive plan.
So they started taking applications that gathered some basic info about the person and their interest. And so kind of try to get the different aspects of demographic.
So we we got, I believe, we got around 85 applications. And, ultimately,
out of that, we we looked and interviewed folks and selected 23 member to serve on the steering committee, and it worked it worked perfect for us. Trey with the town of Davidson also noted the variety of ways they not only gave the town to participate, but also created in order to include populations that might not historically interact directly with government or might face an intimidation factor in connecting with government or might be hard to reach for any other reason. Another example is the college kids. We weren't getting we weren't getting,
input from the college kids. So we actually had business cards made up with QR codes on them, and we were handing these out on all these events. And so I realizing we weren't getting college participation, college student participation because that's what the data was showing us, I went to the college, campus, the coffee shop, and I sat one afternoon, and I distributed business cards about every hour as the as the flow of people in the coffee shop would change. And within three days, we had our college, demographic up to what we consider to be a reasonable representation of that group. So it took it took a little bit more dedicated effort, but just targeted effort. Trey said they also had to think outside of the community in a sense. Another important thing, I think, with a comprehensive plan in a community like ours, we we get a lot of visitors. We're a regional destination of sorts. But we also, in our downtown, have a lot of folks that travel from other parts of the region to work in our community, whether it's the college or businesses. And so we often think of stakeholders in terms of people that are contributing to the vibrancy of our community.
Communities like Davidson said they found the modern comprehensive planning process to be helpful in the relationship between city hall and residents in a day and age when distrust of government shows up on a lot of polling. We undertook in 2018 our public engagement process at the the peak,
at least in recent memory of Davidson, of a lot of distrust of government, not just distrust of federal government, but even distrust of local government. And if you talk to a lot of the folks who've been around Davidson at the time, it was very alarming. I mean, this had this was known as a community where, ideas cutting edge ideas could be pushed, could be implemented. But then if there was disagreement, there was still civil dialogue and civil discourse. And that had at at a minimum taken a big hit if not begun to erode, I think, in a a number of people's minds throughout the community. And so we came along at that point as government trying to do public engagement in that atmosphere, in in what was often a a vitriolic atmosphere at times. And it was very important that the public engagement process was transparent and built trust. And so you've heard me emphasize the demographics of our community and how we went out and solicited voices from all the different demographics. That was in part to make sure that we had covered every aspect of the community. We worked to establish a public engagement process that was transparent, that went out to the people where they are, and got their feedback, solicited their feedback.
Cecile from High Point said he observed a lot of first time connection.
Yes. Yes. Definitely. I mean, you you get that, spectrum. You you'll have folks that are really engaged in in government affairs. And when they see a meeting held by community, or or the city officials, they will attend. There are there are regular folks that come to these meetings, and that size is bigger or smaller depending on what what community you're in. But we did we did get a lot of folks that that this was new to them. They were excited to learn about what it means and how it impacts their daily lives.
John Hodges with Garner said the internal feedback is also priceless.
One thing that we did in our exercise that I mentioned very briefly is we asked all of our leadership team about things that might be important to departments that weren't regularly involved in planning. So our comp plan, and many others do this, but we actually have some cup part of a chapter on how we're gonna implement the the infrastructure needed. So it covers, police service and fire service and things like that. So I think making sure that you're involving all of the departments of the town, even though the comp plan is often driven out of the planning department,
is very key upfront when you're thinking about how to to approach comprehensive planning. Hodges said these efforts to consider all kinds of different audiences and awareness levels really helps to shape what the comprehensive plan is going to be in terms of something people can read and understand, which helps a lot in the connection people have with government.
I think that anytime that we can have a plan that is being used by our planning staff to guide day to day work they do, but is actually sitting on the mayor's desk and he is fluent enough with using it that he flips it open in meetings and points to things in it to help show the vision of the community, I think, is one way that I judge that we've done a pretty good job with our plan this time, and that's the case here. We have a new mayor who walks around with the comp plan or keeps it on his desk and pulls it out in meetings and points to graphics to say, this is what we're looking for in our community. So I think something that does not bear, have to have a staff member along with you to explain it
is one one measure of a good plan. They're taking a similar approach in High Point with its new plan. What we're trying to do is create a document
that is has content that is useful, for us to drive our policy discussions and direction. But at the same time, if somebody who who has never been engaged in this process and runs into this document, that it's easy to read. And once they go through it, they get excited to finish it and understand what the process was and what came out of it. So we're we're using a a kind of a magazine style format for a printed document. So when folks see it, it will look like a magazine, lot of graphics, lot of, pictures, text, callouts, numbers. So it's easy to read. I had folks some, I think this was one of the steering committee members. She she's one, one of the younger demographics. She said she kept reading it, and it was it was very good flow, and the document, kinda makes made sense. And she did not get bored, reading reading the document like, a lot of the planning documents even we do as as staff. You have to take breaks.
Yeah. I I I really like that idea. Be because, yeah, if you think about, you know, land use plans and, you know, other kinds of planning documents, you look at them and, yeah, it's it's just white sheets of paper, eight and a half by 11, and a whole lot of words in in a font that's not necessarily, you know, doesn't really have quite an artistic feel. And Got it. Yeah. A lot of these a lot of these documents, yeah, they're they're unless, you know, you're you're kind of directly involved in that kind of work, they're not really gonna speak to you. So if this is something that the community has been invested in, you know, giving them a
a product that they can follow along with and and appreciate, you know, start to finish. That's real that's a that's an awesome idea. Love it. Yeah. I mean, that that was the intent is if if we I mean, our goal is not to print too many of these because the second part of the product unveiling is what we call the e plan. So a lot of the content that came out of the comprehensive plan and will be in that document I just referenced, we're now transitioning that project website. The the domain is going to remain the same, but we're not once once we adopt the plan, it's gonna completely transform into a document itself. So it will it will serve as a eplan where you'll have, obviously, because it's online, it's going to be formatted differently. But a lot of the graphics, content, everything will what you saw in that PDF magazine would be translated into the web so people can, browse through on the web, and it's gonna live there. And if we if we update it down the road, then we can go and update it. So so it's a it's a multitude. The goal again is to is to get it out in the community so folks don't feel that, oh, it's a very technical document. I don't wanna read it. We want them to read it and feel like, oh, it was a easier read. I got something out of it. One of the cool things about working with municipalities, and this might benefit towns that are about to go through a comprehensive planning process themselves or maybe update an existing plan
is that municipal officials are so willing to share ideas and templates for things that might help make the process easier for others. Here's Trey from Davidson.
If you this is all on our website. Just like if you need an outline to, like, think through how we've what we've talked about. If you go to townofdavidson.org backslash comp plan 2020, if you start at the bottom, you've got the community snapshot report, that demographic report I talked about. Mhmm. You then have two public engagement reports that solely report on how the public engagement was conducted and what we learned. Then you have the plan itself and the implementation guide. So we did we did reports just on public engagement to show how important we took it. And in the back of those reports, you find an appendix with every single comment from that plan listed. Wow. So it's there, and you can control f and word search it. It's there. Jeff with Garner. I think it's also important to keep in mind what's manageable.
There's there's other plans out there that I've looked at, and if I were to pull out all the recommendations in that plan, I would have just pages and pages and pages, hundreds upon hundreds of things. And, you know, for for a large city, maybe maybe that works. Mhmm. But I do think it is important to keep in perspective, you know, just how much can you really be expected to manage and keep your focus off.
To take us out, I'm gonna play you the answer that Sushil gave when I asked how a document like this, a document his town is about to adopt, how that document can stand the test of time and keep its relevance potentially decades into the future. You know, sometimes you hear people say, you know, that this is not a document that's gonna sit on the shelf. This is gonna be a living document and and, you know, kind of what that means, how how that document does actually interact with decisions going forward. And and and, also, how do you keep a a you you know, comprehensive plans are supposed to have a, you know, kind of a lifetime or at least it looks forward potentially decades. How do you keep a document from a certain time period kinda relevant to things in the future? Are are there opportunities to amend it as things change, or, how does that part of it work?
Yeah. So one one of the things and so I I think the term you use amendment, it used to be very common that you when things don't go your way, you amend the land use plan and make it the way you want. So the approach we we're taking on on this process is try to trying to get away from that, trying to get away from amending the plan, by the city or by the applicant when things don't align with what we have adopted. Mhmm. If we if we don't stay true to the policies we put in place and let it play out for a time period, we won't know whether it works or not. So I I think we we are definitely not encouraging that. And matter of fact, we're not even calling options for amendment, unless there is something that we never knew, happened, like like the social media boom or whatever that AI future down the road picks up and we have to we have to change our policies to match that, then then we definitely will look at it. But, again, the council always has that option to amend it. Our goal is not to get into amending it for the sake of a project to happen, every other month. So we're trying to get away from that that habit of amending the plan. So, to to help that, the approach we're taking with with this comprehensive plan is a little bit different. So we're not calling it your typical land use map. All the comprehensive plan will have a mapping component to it. We've utilized, the concept called place types and activity centers. So we will have a map. We will have a map. That is part of the comprehensive plan and will be in the document and also as a standalone map itself. So the so the the approach we took was rather than calling it single family, multifamily land use, or commercial retail, whatever that is that we traditionally use, we went away from that and created a pallet of place types. That will be much broader and focuses on the form and character of the community rather than a land use on a piece of parcel. So it's it's it's much more context driven. So there there is a range of pallets that we have from, so if you're on the edge of the city, so that's what we're what we're calling it, suburban edge or rural place type to to downtown. And then there are urban neighborhoods, sub suburban neighborhood, because of High Point's, background with industrial. We have transitional industrial, which is key for us to grow because a lot a lot of the the heavy industrial areas from the past are are are turning into something else, mixed mixed use, retail or some residential. So we wanna take that opportunity and and tap it as a transitional area. So a lot of those thought process, has been has been documented well through these place types. Obviously, when we go into the regulations, we have to create, zoning districts and things like that to align with the place types. But we've kind of gotten away from your typical land use designations. And then, the second part of that is the activity centers. If you look on the map that we have, there are throughout the throughout the city, we have 16 different activity centers we've created where we in in different parts of the community, and there are there are different types of activity centers. We had couple that are more regional that draws folks from wider spread, not only from your community, but from your neighboring community. And then typically people would drive to these places and could could include big boxes, shopping centers, and things like that. But then you have town centers that are much more, walkable. Then your lowest category would be the neighborhood centers. Even more walkable, like five to ten minutes, people living in the nearby residential areas could go and grab a coffee, could go and get their haircut, or may get their nail fixed, or get go go to their dental, whatever that is. These different activity center are driven by different uses in different parts of the city. The idea is spread them around where it makes sense so folks have something they need on a day to day basis is right around their neighborhood. So you don't have to drive necessarily to go somewhere to get get a gallon of milk. It could be nearby you where you you may be able to walk. Or if you choose not to walk, if there is a trail, we would, offer that, or it's it would be a quick drive. So so it's it's the mix of activity center and place types to kind of drive the growth inwards. But one of the concept we used, we we tested a growth concept, a growth scenario. We presented those to folks throughout throughout the meetings is, how do we wanna grow? As we create these policies, do we wanna continue like we've been doing this, or do we make a slight pivot? Or do we make these drastic changes where we we need to really think about preserving open space, common space in the edges for our future generation and and and increase density inwards so that the all the other things work, your transit, walkable community, the mix of retail in different ports. So that drove this activity centers. So, yeah, I mean, we were very proud of where the community was. Community supported not growing outwards. They they they supported us to grow inwards and infill and try to focus on this activity growth centers. So combining that with the the place type module we have, I think we have a pretty good recipe for success to help us, help us grow in a very sustainable manner.
So what we just heard was less of an intro to comprehensive planning and the legalities and so on, and more of a jam session of philosophies and approaches that different communities have used to improve their work in comprehensive planning and involve the community the best it can in new ways with new ideas, securing trust that might not have been there before, and so on. I hope you enjoyed this discussion. And if it brings anything to mind for you, let me know. My name is Ben Brown, and you can reach me at bbrown@nclm.org. NCLM stands for North Carolina League of Municipalities, which brings you this podcast. I wanna thank the towns of Davidson, Garner, and High Point for their time and help with this episode. I'd love to include a spotlight on your city as well. We're gonna keep rolling out episodes of municipal equation at nclm.org and through our email blasts, and I hope you submit ideas for episodes. We're looking for topics that happen in the space of municipal government within cities and towns, and I'd love to hear your ideas for good stories or spotlights. Again, my name is Ben Brown, and you can reach me@bbrownatnclm.org. Talk to you next time.