A Businessman Calls for Heart & Soul

From PCJ Editor Wayne Senville:

Lyman Orton is a highly successful entrepreneur, one of the owners of the Vermont Country Store. While Orton's business -- founded by his parents Vrest and Ellen Orton in 1946 -- does operate two country stores in the small towns of Weston and Rockingham, Vermont, its primary source of revenue is through its national mail order and online business.

There are not many from the business community who, like Lyman Orton, have invested their time (and money) in promoting local planning. At this past week's CommunityMatters07 Conference he described what first got him interested in planning.

It involved a proposal to build "Wildlife Wonderland" -- a tourist-oriented attraction to be filled with African wildlife -- in his home town of Weston, Vermont (population about 600). Orton, who was a member of the Weston planning commission at the time, recounts that the project split the community, with some looking forward to the local revenue benefits, and others aghast at what was being proposed and how it could totally change the character of the town.

While a variation of the project was approved (substituting Vermont wildlife for African), Wildlife Wonderland went bankrupt within a year.

But the whole episode left Orton wondering why the town wasn't better prepared to deal with a proposal like this, and why the town plan hadn't provided more guidance on the town's core values.

Orton's Wildlife Wonderland experience certainly helped shape his (and his friend Noel Fritzinger's) 1995 decision to form the Orton Family Foundation, a non-profit with a mission of helping citizens and local goverments in small towns and rural areas "better define and shape the futures of their towns."

As Orton observed at the Conference, a town plan needs to focus on the "heart and soul" of the community. But most town plans, he noted, include "no statement of the things that really matter to us."

The focus on the CommunityMatters Conference was on ways of getting at the heart and soul of the community -- and I'll touch on several of the quite interesting presentations in my next posting. For now, let me at least steer you to the recently released Orton Family Foundation publication, Planning for Community Heart and Soul: A Review of Tools, Processes and Practitioners (available to download). As the report notes:

"A major block to planning with heart and soul is the difficulty of even defining many of the concepts involved. Communities vary immensely in their landscapes, citizens, histories, and resources, all of which contribute to sense of character. Communities and organizations also have very different ways of describing that character; heart and soul is alternatively described as community character, values, community identity, and sense of place, to name a few, and those terms are not even used in consistent ways.

However heart and soul is defined, it is impossible to identify and protect universal character without also defining community, agreement, protect, citizen, implement, and other words that we rarely pause to contemplate. ... Most planning focuses on discrete, quantifiable, and physical elements of a community; it is much more difficult to plan for something as abstruse as friendliness, healthiness, or rural feeling."

I found the above especially interesting given that much of what I heard about during my six weeks of conversations with planners and planning commissioners this Summer involved discussions about community identity, sense of place, and quality of life. I also reported on the challenges facing one small town (Middleburg, Virginia) and one small city (Gunnison, Colorado) facing major development proposals.

In his remarks, Lyman Orton noted that "we need to challenge the single-minded notion that if it's good for the economy, we must approve it." Coming from a  citizen planner who is also a highly successful businessman, those are words to especially take note of.