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A summary page from the Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium Vision 2040 overlays urban redevelopment, transit and preservation of open land.

(Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium)

If Northeast Ohio did three things that sound simple – but are in fact really hard - it could limit sprawl, safeguard natural resources and blaze a path to a smarter, greener and more economically robust future.

That's the thrust of the latest iteration of "Vibrant NEO 2040," a long-term vision for the region prepared by the Northeast Ohio Sustainable Communities Consortium, the biggest regional planning effort in decades in this part of the world.

The sustainability group is suggesting that the 12 counties of Northeast Ohio use public policy, development incentives and other tools to focus investment on existing communities rather than on new development on the fringe.

The group also suggests that the region’s county-based transit agencies should provide more transit options within and between cities across the region. And the group would like to see more open land preserved for agriculture and parks, rather than plowed under for new subdivisions.

Those three steps – investment in existing communities, more transit, and preservation of open land – are the gist of the evolving vision, which is the subject of 10 free public meetings scheduled throughout the region through Thursday, Oct. 17.

The goal of the sustainability group is to complete a final draft by December and seek official approval for the vision from counties and the region’s metropolitan planning organizations and councils of government in 2014.

Clevelanders have a chance to weigh in on the vision tonight at Harvey Rice Elementary School, 2730 E. 116th St., Cleveland. Registration begins at 6 p.m., and the program is from 6:30 to 8 p.m.

Participants will be asked to respond to a presentation that lays out the Vibrant NEO vision, which is based on earlier scenarios that explored the pros and cons of various pathways to the region’s future.

The core issue explored in those scenarios was whether the region should continue to expand physically with thinly settled suburban areas designed primarily around automobiles as the primary mode of transportation, or whether Northeast Ohio should focus on concentrating new development in areas already settled, including the region’s older cities.

A report released by the sustainability group in April warned that if the current pattern of sprawl development continues in Northeast Ohio, the region will see 18 houses a day abandoned in urban areas.

Meanwhile, suburban communities could add tens of thousands of new, single family houses and build enough miles of new highway to extend from Cleveland to Panama.

The cost of serving the newly developed areas – and dealing with the abandonment of cities – will render even the wealthiest county in the region poorer than the poorest county today by 2040.

According to preferences gleaned from more than 5,000 residents in scores of meetings, online polls, an online planning game and other exercises over the past 18 months, sprawl is not how the majority of respondents want to see the region grow.

The project has been funded by a three-year, $4.3 million grant from the federal Partnership for Sustainable Communities.

“It’s a long-term framework for a very big geography,” Hunter Morrison, the director of the sustainability group, said of the emerging vision. “We’ve done our best to reach out to as many different types of people as possible.”

In surveys, Morrison said, residents and officials in 10 of the 12 counties said that maintaining clean air and water are their highest priorities, indicating that environmental quality is a top concern in the region.

The sustainability group – a voluntary consortium of cities, counties, planning agencies, universities, foundations and cultural institutions has no power to impose its concepts beyond that of persuasion.

Cities and towns have control over land use and zoning, and regional planning historically has been weak in Northeast Ohio and most other parts of the U.S.

But the sustainability group is hoping that its ideas take root in the region through long-term policies of metropolitan planning organizations, such as the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency, which oversees federal spending on transportation in the Cleveland area.

Counties included in the Vibrant NEO project are Cuyahoga, Lorain, Medina, Wayne, Stark, Summit, Portage, Mahoning, Trumbull, Ashtabula, Lake and Geauga.

The overarching nature of Vibrant NEO 2040 is broader in scale than the debate over regionalism in Cuyahoga County, where County Executive Ed FitzGerald is championing consolidation of public safety services among 59 political subdivisions.

“I see this as the beginning of a much more robust and informed dialogue across Northeast Ohio about where we’re headed,” Morrison said.