Tag: Emily Kettell Community and Regional Planning University of Oregon

Meet Our Amazing CSC Summer Interns: Emily Kettell

Posted on by Julia Havens

Emily-Kettel CPW Community Planning Workshop OPDR Oregon Partnership for Disaster Resilience University of OregonName:   Emily Kettell

Where were you born and where do you call home?   I was born in Winfield, Illinois, but I’ve lived in Geneva, a Chicago suburb, for most of my life. I went to college at DePaul University, and now call Chicago home.

What’s your favorite pig-out food?    My favorite pig-out food would have to be pizza (I mean, I am from Chicago).

In which graduate program are you enrolled?   I’m enrolled in the Community and Regional Planning graduate program. I started out very specific and originally wanted to focus on environmental planning; however, now I’m more interested in land use planning in general.

Dream Job?   If I weren’t going into planning, I’d love to be a pastry chef and one day, open my own bakery. For those who don’t know me, I’m pretty obsessed with desserts, and learning how to make them. I studied abroad in Paris, and since then, have wanted to learn how to make desserts as good as the ones I had in France!

2014 CPW Project –   I worked on the Madras Hazards Plan Integration Project during the Community Planning Workshop (CPW) classes. For this project, my team and I worked to integrate the Jefferson County Natural Hazard Mitigation Plan, a non-regulatory document, with Madras’ comprehensive plan, a regulatory document. The final deliverable was a revised natural hazards chapter for the Madras’ comprehensive plan. The revised chapter is important because it not only fulfills Goal 7 of Oregon’s statewide planning goals, but it is also one tool that City of Madras can use to better prepare for natural hazards. My team’s role was to research best practices, gather public input, and create the revised chapter as well as natural hazard educational materials for residents of Madras.

What are the most critical skill(s) you learned from being engaged in CPW this past year –   One of the most critical skills I learned from CPW this past year is how to communicate more effectively. In CPW I learned a lot about facilitating meetings and presenting information clearly and to various audiences, whether it be a world café style open house, or more formal presentation in front of the planning commission. CPW emphasizes the feedback process, so it was really helpful to run through presentations in front of the class to hear what I could do better, or what worked/ didn’t work before the presentation with our client. Along with that, learning how to communicate important information via writing was another critical part of CPW. My team and I created educational materials, a poster, a video, memos, a staff report, and a revised chapter, all which required a different style of writing in order to convey information effectively to various audiences.

What about CPW made you smile?   It’s been really interesting to look back on what I knew in January and look at what I know now. I never thought I would know so much about natural hazards, particularly flooding, or have the opportunity to work on such an important project for a city as a graduate student. While there is still some work to be done in order to finish up the project, looking at all of the deliverables the team made, particularly our revised chapter, and realizing that what we created will really benefit the city, is a pretty awesome feeling.

Name  one “best kept secret”  you recommend and why? I don’t know that I have a list of “best-kept secrets” books or websites, but one site that I find pretty interesting as a planning student is the Atlantic’s City Lab (http://www.citylab.com) website. It’s a good one-stop place to find city/planning related news and innovative projects that are going on around the world, and can be a good jumping off point if you need an idea for school research. Also, there are usually really interesting visuals that make the articles much more interesting to read through.

What are your big summer plans?   On the weekends, when I’m not interning with the Community Service Center and with the City of Eugene Planning Division, I’ll be traveling around Oregon! Besides traveling for CPW and other school projects, I haven’t had a chance to see much of the state. This summer, I finally want to visit the coast and go camping at Crater Lake. In September, I’ll be traveling around Hungary and then going back home for a friend’s wedding!

Where can we ‘cyber-stalk’ you?  LinkedIn- Emily Kettell

What the Public Wants

Posted on by Julia Havens

Emily Kettell Community Planning Workshop CPW Madras Hazards NHMP Intergration

My Community Planning Workshop team, Madras Hazards Plan Integration Project,  is working in the City of Madras to update a chapter in the city’s comprehensive plan regarding natural hazards. You might think that this project sounds pretty simple; we do some research and we write our chapter of the comprehensive plan. However, that is not the case! As I’ve learned in my first two quarters of graduate school involving the public is a crucial step that can’t be overlooked even in writing a few short pages about natural hazards. While the team has certainly been doing its fair share of research, one of our key objectives is to see what the public wants is included  so that the city can effectively address natural hazards in Madras.

To start off with, what is a comprehensive plan, and why am I blogging about it?

Madras has to address 14 of the 19 Oregon statewide planning goals in its comprehensive plan. This long-range document outlines where a community is at currently, where it wants to be in future, and how it will get there. A community should consider what kinds of elements to include in its comprehensive plan. Some typical elements that are usually included are land use, infrastructure, housing, parks, and education. Information from the comprehensive plan will inform more specific policies and citywide ordinances.

It is important for residents to understand their city’s comprehensive plan because everyone is supposed to have a chance to give input as the plan is being developed. After all, you should get a say in how you want your home, neighborhood, and city to change over time. As we identify citywide goals and possible policies, there is no one better to tell us how the city could mitigate natural hazards, such as flooding, than the residents themselves!

To get this input, we are conducting initial interviews with 10-15 stakeholders in Madras. We are hoping that local officials and property owners with land in the floodplain can tell us what they think residents, business owners, and city officials should do to mitigate natural hazards in Madras. This is a very important step because while our team certainly has some great ideas for potential policies, we should not get the final say in regards to how Madras decides to reduce its risk to natural hazards.

From these interviews, our team hopes to get a general feel as to how key stakeholders feel, and then we are going to try and produce more specific questions in the form of an online survey for all residents of the city. Another way we will get residents involved is through a public forum that we are going to hold in April.

By the end of the interviews, surveys, and public forum, our team hopes that we can draft the natural hazards chapter for the comprehensive plan and tailor what we write to what the residents of Madras want, as well as create a natural hazards chapter that will effectively lead to policy to mitigate natural hazards in Madras. As someone not from Madras (or Oregon) I shouldn’t have the final say of the content in the comprehensive plan and am happy that our team is working so hard to find out what is important to residents and how to incorporate this information in the most effective way possible.
Emily Kettell University of Oregon Community Planning Workshop CPW Madras Hazards Plan Integration

 

Emily Kettell is a first year Community and Regional Planning graduate student. She moved to Eugene from Chicago where she received her Bachelors degree from DePaul University, majoring in French and Public Policy, with a concentration in Environmental Studies.