The NDDC hosted a stakeholder input gathering session Wednesday night at the Upstairs Rueb. The purpose of the session was to give the NDDC’s representative to the Mayor’s Ad Hoc Task Force, Joe Grundhoefer, ideas to bring to the table for discussion and, hopefully, implementation.

The session was professionally facilitated by Charles Skinner of Fit Organizations. Charley warned us ahead of time that we were trying to do eight hours of work in a two hour session.

Dan Bergeson, NDDC President, encouraged us to think beyond 2005’s Streetscape Plan and to plan long-term for the over $2 million of downtown investment over the next ten years. Charley Skinner suggested that we think in time-frames of 2 years, 10 years and 20 years in our brain-storming.

NDDC Board Member Keith Covey, said that two local people, Jim Bohnhoff, a design professional, and Spencer Jones, a landscape architect, are subcontracted by Dahlgren, Shardlow, and Uban for some of this work, and, as residents of Northfield, will bring a long-term and big-picture perspective to their work.

(See more photos in the N.org photo album of the event.)

The two dozen or so participants generated over 400 post-it note ideas. Keith Covey is working away at this very moment to put these ideas into a single Word document to be posted on this site.