Improvise, Innovate and Involve: 3 Planners Reveal the Importance of Flipping Your Perspective

Sophia Burns: Welcome to Short Takes, the three-episode podcast mini-series by the American Planning Association. I'm your host, Sophia Burns. Short Takes brings listeners into the field with planners who are pursuing newsworthy, innovative strategies for their communities and showing you why they worked. We've all heard the saying, ‘You can't really understand another person's experience until you've walked a mile in their shoes.' And it's true. How can we ever truly understand someone if we've never looked at the world from their unique perspective?

Here's where the planning field comes in. Planners are process-oriented people, but do they always know how community members experience those processes? They don't always, according to my first guest. She's a veteran planner who flipped the script and became the customer during a home renovation a few years ago. She assumed she'd fly through the zoning, permitting and inspection process with ease, but she was surprised to learn what it felt like on the other side.

Rebecca Everette: My name is Rebecca Everette. I'm from Fort Collins, Colorado, and I am the community development director for Larimer County, Colorado. For those of you planners who work for local government agencies or other regulatory agencies, I would ask, ‘How well do you really know your own processes?' In 2018, I was the development review manager for the City of Fort Collins, Colorado, and I managed planners, development review coordinators, zoning inspectors and building permit technicians. I was, by all accounts, an expert in my city's processes for development, review and planning. You know, just a quick, easy 12-step process is no big deal. It only takes a few years to get through.

I was also, at that time, about to embark on a major addition to my 1910 Sears and Roebuck catalog home, which was going to involve tearing off our only bathroom, cutting off water service, vacating the house, and therefore “Airbnb-ing it” and couch surfing with my spouse and my two-year-old toddler for several months. Not exactly a relaxing four-month getaway. Of course, adding on to our house wasn't as simple as hiring a contractor and pulling a permit. The process involved historic review, which unearthed some pretty cool information; setback variances, which required public hearings; and an after-the-fact permit for a past illegal addition on the house — all before we even got to the standard building permit and inspection process. I was so confident going into this process. I knew I knew how everything worked in my department. I knew all the people involved. I knew I could get this through easily.

Sophia: Or so she thought. As a self-admitted process nerd, Rebecca decided to take on the role of a secret shopper and make notes along the way of what worked and what didn't. Some steps were frictionless and easy, she says, while others were confounding and frustrating.

Rebecca: I experienced the uncertainty of various hearings, failed inspections, unexpected process delays, miscommunications, and cost escalations. And it was really surprisingly difficult, even with all that I knew going in. After I got my certificate of occupancy at the end of the process, I took my notes and debriefed my findings with our Community Development Director and some other key managers to help us identify some opportunities for improvement within our department.

Sophia: So, what did she learn along the way? A lot — including the fact that everyone hates bureaucracy no matter what side of the table they're on. But her biggest takeaway was that a little empathy can go a long way.

Rebecca: Literally everyone hates bureaucracy, including those working within the system, and we often rely on exceptional customer service to compensate or even overcompensate for our cumbersome systems and processes. And sometimes that masks what's actually wrong with the process itself.

Second, there are humans on both sides of the counter, and empathy and a commitment to making each other's jobs easier — each other's lives easier — can really go both ways. Not every customer is a planning and building professional.

Next, seemingly minor decisions on the government side can cause pretty major delays and financial impacts to the customer, and that's really important to remember for customers who don't have significant financial backing or the ability to absorb surprise requirements and scope changes.

And finally, if you haven't been in the customer's shoes yourself, you probably don't have a complete understanding of how your process works in great detail.

Sophia: Since her time in the customer seat, Rebecca has employed a few tools to improve the experience for others. First, during pre-planning, she now uses customer experience mapping. And afterwards, she conducts post-process interviews with applicants, particularly inexperienced customers, to identify their pain points and discuss ideas about how to improve the process going forward.

Rebecca: Experience mapping is bringing the customer to the table and asking them to follow you through the process and explain what their experience is at each step along the way to point out what you probably don't see on the other side. And that helps to paint a more comprehensive picture of how the process actually functions — not just the points in the process where it's in staff's hands. Job shadowing is another great tool [to use] with other members of your team (or between teams) to understand how everyone's portion of the process works, how it all connects, and to gain a broader view of the overall system. There's something I use that I like to call an empathy panel, which is really just asking customers to come into the office and share their stories directly with the staff who work on these tasks day to day, or who may have been involved in their process, and that helps to put a human face to the work that we do.

Sophia: As the customer, Rebecca experienced delays, additional costs and setbacks, none of which was all that surprising. But what did surprise her is that as a planner, she may have held on to certain beliefs that simply weren't true.

Rebecca: I think first, there is an idea that some planners and public servants have that the customer on the other side is trying to get around regulations or trying to get away with something, when really the person on the other side is just trying to achieve a goal. They're trying to get something done, and they want to work with the process. They want to do it right most of the time, but they don't understand how to do that or they don't have all the information to be able to get through that process themselves without a lot of help, especially if they're homeowner or business owner or another small-time applicant. So that was one thing that was surprising, that the person on the other side of the counter really does want to get through the process, and they want to work with you. They're not trying to fight the process when they're asking questions or asking for help.

Sophia: She also learned what part of her own process was potentially failing her customers and how to make it better for everybody.

Rebecca: Going through the process yourself really helps to shine a light on the transition points in the process. So, you may have the permit intake process really dialed in. But what happens when it moves to referral agencies for review? Or you might complete the referral agency process and get the comment letter out to the customer. But then how does that customer move to resubmit? And what are those handoffs that are happening from one department to another or back and forth with the customer? And that's where things tend to fall through the cracks. That's where the miscommunications happen, and that's where a lot of the frustration and tension points come up. And we don't talk a lot about those handoffs when we're talking about our processes.

Sophia: Good communication is essential to any relationship. But what might be even more important is empathy, a skill that APA is currently helping planners develop and hone, along with other relational skills. So, I asked Rebecca how planners can learn from her experience and train their empathy muscles.

Rebecca: Something that planners can do to strengthen that muscle is really focus on asking questions of their customers, their applicants, in whatever context you're in — the people who are across the table from you when you have an instinct to answer or to provide information, countering that with asking a question can be really powerful. So, instead of sharing information about your regulations, asking [questions like], “Why are you asking this question?” or “What is it that you need to be successful?” can open up a whole different conversation with a customer that can build deeper understanding and empathy on your part to see the why behind somebody else's actions or choices or project that they're trying to accomplish.

Sophia: Next, we'll hear from another planner who had a struggle with the zoning department. Like Rebecca, he applied fresh thinking to solve a long-standing challenge. This time, the tension point was parking. In the United States alone, there are more than 2 billion parking spaces, which equates to more than six parking spaces for every registered car in the country. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? As planners know, different zoning ordinances require a minimum number of parking spaces for different land uses, so eliminating excessive parking requirements isn't easy. We talked to him about the benefits of reducing parking requirements and how it can benefit small businesses and the community as a whole.

Brian Mercer: My name is Brian Mercer. I'm a city planner with the city of Richmond. I've been there for about seven years now. I worked in the zoning department for five years, and I saw all these onerous parking requirements. They were really impacting small businesses.

Sophia: Brian says he only became passionate about eliminating parking restrictions because of his experience at the zoning office in Richmond, Virginia. Witnessing the frustrations of members of the public from the inside gave him a unique point of view. At first, Brian was met with pushback, especially when people heard less parking for local businesses. But at the public hearing where Brian finally presented his reduced parking plan to committee members, only one person showed up in opposition.

Brian: It was very rewarding to see how it finished. I think as the process played its course, people started to see these arbitrary parking requirements. Like a bowling alley— five parking spaces per lane. Even if you go there with your family, it's like, why do we need five [parking spaces] per lane? It really goes down to this: the small business aspect of it. [These] small businesses want to open up in Richmond, but sometimes you have these parking requirements.

Sophia: What Brian proposed was to let business owners and developers decide if they want parking. Some fear that this would result in massive structures with no available parking, but that didn't happen, as it turns out. Developments in Richmond historically came with more parking spots than the mandated minimums, resulting in a whole lot of parking.

Brian: I went through all 50 developments, whether it was residential, commercial or mixed use, and we looked at how many would have been required by the zoning ordinance and how many were provided. 4,000 would have been required and 12,000 were provided. Clearly when people say, ‘Oh, there's no there's no parking,' it's like, ‘Yes, there is parking, but it's just not utilized properly.'

There's this urban winery that wanted to open up in a little strip center area, and there was plenty of parking, but the parking requirements required one per 100ft². And they were well short. It's like there's not that many tables in here. It's like people are just hanging out, having a good time. And luckily, they got every approval. The only thing that was holding it up from opening was the parking requirement, and luckily we adopted it in April of 2023. And then right after that happened, they were able to open up. They didn't have to get a special-use permit and take six to eight months.

Sophia: Witnessing the opening of an urban winery downtown had to be encouraging for other local business owners. However, there was another battle to be won in the older areas of Richmond, which were built before parking requirements. Community members were nervous, even angry, about what Brian's proposal meant for them. But eventually he had to rip off the Band-Aid and change the code. I asked Brian about some concrete tools planners can use to make this type of success possible. He mentioned something called parking overlays, which are zoning districts that allow for the development of off-street parking facilities in accordance with the city's traffic patterns, land use and densities. By thinking about it from the point of view of local business owners, the zoning change allowed new businesses to open up with just the amount of parking they need.

My final guest also took on a major parking challenge that turned out, in the end, to really be about helping a community adapt to change. About 600 permanent residents live in the small town of Bayfield, Wisconsin. Bayfield is often teeming with tourists, many of whom park once and spend the whole day at the beach. While that's great for the town, it's tough on parking. A lack of parking turnover created a lot of competition for spots among visitors and locals — until my next guest suggested a plan. She shared with me the value of paid parking, what it was like working with a small community and how she had to change her point of view to make things work.

Helen Schuda: My name is Helen Schuda, and I am a transportation planning analyst at Kimley-Horn here in the Twin Cities in our Saint Paul office. So, the city of Bayfield contacted Kimley-Horn and asked us to help with refining a parking management plan that a volunteer group had put together, and they were interested in making it more implementable and sort of getting some of the knots untied. They were having a lot of issues where employees or people who were parking all day to go on excursions were sort of taking up those prime parking spots and limiting the ability for people to hop in and hop out of the grocery store or local business.

Sophia: The first thing that the new plan included was paid parking, which is an excellent way to encourage parking turnover. Not only can more people find available parking, but it's also an avenue for revenue. It's a win-win situation.

Helen: It's really challenging for municipalities in Wisconsin to raise their sales tax. So even though they're getting all these visitors, it was really challenging for them to sort of capture that in their city's revenue. It was also important for them to have simple and enforceable rules. They just don't have a lot of staff capacity. Being such a small community, enforcing anything like that was too complex.

Sophia: Of course, as with any worthwhile project that entails significant change, there were challenges along the way before any new plan was rolled out. Helen and her team had to work directly with locals and get their buy in — a process that planners know well. What they weren't expecting was for 100 people to show up at the public meeting — and they had strong feelings. Community members were really concerned about how the town could preserve its historical charm while also pursuing economic growth.

Helen: People really wanted to talk about those big-picture things, like how do we preserve what we love as we grow and change in Bayfield? Who is part of our community, and what are our goals as a community? So there were a lot of strong reactions, a lot of big-picture conversations. First, it was kind of intimidating because we were there to focus on parking, but we were really talking about these huge things. But we actually found it to be really helpful to learn from these initial reactions. So we tried to embrace these conversations and understand where people were coming from and understand the bigger context for the parking challenges that Bayfield was having while gradually shifting the conversation toward more specific parking management issues, using a mapping activity and other types of tools.

Sophia: Because they were working in a small, rural town, Helen says they didn't have many local examples or best practices to follow while devising this parking plan. So rather than leading with her own pitch, she listened to community members and followed their lead.

Helen: We really found it to be helpful to step back and listen to what people were telling us. I think that it's important anywhere that you go to follow the community's lead. But it was especially important when we were sort of not in our element. The community and some of the staff led us to engage with additional stakeholders that we didn't know would even be important parts of the process. And we found it really helpful to pivot our engagement approach and follow the community's lead as needed.

Sophia: By opening up conversations with community members, Helen's team landed on the core of residents' concerns: their struggle between maintaining their quality of life and growing Bayfield's economy, which relies on tourism. Sure, locals wanted to raise money, but would paid parking scare visitors away from Bayfield? Planners had to weigh the economic benefits against this potential PR problem.

Helen: It was really important to them to be seen as a welcoming community that wanted people to come and visit and wanted people to shop there, and they saw paid parking as sort of a big-city thing that was maybe unwelcoming. And so, we had a lot of conversations about this, trying to understand where those were coming from. And I think that was just sort of a deeper thing that we have in this country: we don't necessarily mind the money that we're paying for parking, but the hassle of it and the experience of it is often the source of some of that. They are very successful as a tourist destination, and they want to continue to be.

Sophia: Another challenge that Helen's team encountered were resource and political constraints. The budget was small, so her team had to get creative. The solution, which may not work in larger towns, was a permit parking system.

Helen: We needed to make sure that any interventions were fairly low cost and that we were really understanding the resource constraints when we were making recommendations. There were also certain things that we might have recommended in other places that we didn't recommend in Bayfield, or we modified our recommendations for political reasons. So things like having a permit system that's very affordable for employees and residents might not be something we would do typically or that we would recommend typically. But it was very important politically in Bayfield for this to be part of the plan. It helped us to recommend more limited but high-impact solutions.

Some of the things that helped us to work around these constraints included that our recommended paid parking area was very limited in geography, much more limited than the initial plan that was put together by the volunteer group — just to keep things as high-impact as possible, and then also integrating technology that would include a permit system and a payment system that were integrated together to limit the amount of staff capacity that was needed to support the program.

Sophia: By flipping the script to get things done, Helen's team learned some valuable lessons in the process, including how to navigate change for community members in a small town.

Helen: So overall, some of the things that we learned were to embrace the big picture, embrace the iceberg, even when the plan is specific in scope, even when it's just a parking plan. It's important to understand the overall context. Sometimes that happens through previous plans, but for us, it happened through these conversations with people. Listening first and adjusting our approach as needed was really important. Working in this smaller community, pivoting our engagement approach helped us to learn the most that we could. And then finally, [we focused] on lower-cost, higher-impact solutions — important everywhere, but especially when working in a smaller place.

Even the best plan isn't a silver bullet for all the problems with parking and all of the problems with growth, but there are ways for it to really improve things. And I think that was something that I didn't fully expect — the breadth that the conversation would take — but it ended up being a great learning experience for me as a planner.

Sophia: Change isn't easy for any community, but for planners, managing for change is often the name of the game. Helping stakeholders or community members navigate change requires out-of-the-box thinking, taking a fresh perspective, putting yourself in someone else's shoes, and sometimes leading by following.

Thanks for listening to Short Takes, an APA podcast. We hope you've enjoyed our episodes on creative community, engagement, careers and flipping your point of view. We hope you'll take the perspective we've shared from planners just like you and be inspired to apply new thinking in your practice. If you want to hear more great conversations with experts from across the planning landscape, subscribe to Apple Podcasts so you'll never miss an episode. And if you like what you're hearing, rate us on iTunes. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find our entire library of episodes at Planning.org/Podcast.