Gr Metro planning

[aowwt]

Some thoughts I been thinking. I am not sure if this fully belongs in this area or in the off topic area. In anycase I will find it if it is moved. Here is my thoughts. I do love the aspect of our GR Metro area. The only problem I see is that we focus a ton on the downtown area here. Although I understand it to a huge margin lets look at how this area works. The GR City is based around the commerical and business aspect of providing government services, major corporate offices, venues for entertianment, medical services, and educational points. The problem I see is that those provide a good well roundness I just do not see a lot of industry unless its right around the southern side of town by the wyoming gr border.

The thing with the metro area is that the burbs tend to get a lot of industry. The city of wyoming has the largest industry tax base in the state if I am not mistaken. The thing that this brings is that a lot of the service based business tend to be placed in those locations as well. So what our burbs tend to be like is a lot working class people who are either in the middle to lower income brackets and those businesses tend to do quite well in those areas. The problem I see is not enough effort is being made by those business to be green. Most of the service business require management to drive which causes us to sprawl more and more.

Expanding on the sprawl it forces us to continue to expand and expand without developing upwards. I think that forces the planning of transportation difficult at best. I do believe though the GR Metro area needs a full transportation model but one that forces the outlying areas like Lowell, Rockford, Sparta, and other outlying areas from expanding industry. The placing of industry helps those areas but it also makes sprawl worse. I think those cities should look at other means of keeping the farmers from selling and instead using parts of thier land for income that can be done with little or no additional workforce. One of those ideas is windfarms placed on farmland where the farmers get more income and as a result can help those sprawl cities from having to expand as they get more income from the farmers.

These are some of my thoughts I thought I could share and bring some suggestions on battling the sprawl and still keep those cities from having to using old methods of expanding the services they provide.