Santee Hosts "Show Your Love San Diego" Workshop

Tuesday afternoon scores of San Diegans, local leaders, business people, and residents that seriously care about planning for the future, came together in Santee to help hone a shared vision and plan for the next 50-100 years in the region and to "."

The San Diego Foundation, the largest non-profit in San Diego, is spearheading "Our Greater San Diego Vision," a non-governmental civic engagement process with the goal of creating a collective vision of the future for the San Diego region from public input.

The workshop on Tuesday at began with a poll of the estimated 80 attendees on what issues are most important to them, such as education, transportation, recreational options and more.

The second half, which winnowed down to about 50 people, involved a huge map of the region with color indications of developable land, used land, transportation and transit routes and public facilities. Groups of five to ten people gathered around the map and placed different colored sticky icons to indicate where they wanted new facilities, housing, transport and other developments in the future.

First, 1,000 San Diegans were surveyed about quality of life in the region, 78 percent of which reported that they felt a "grand plan is needed to manage the growth of our region."

The poll takers reported that the cost of living in the region being amongst the highest in the country is the issue that has the highest impact on their quality of life. Our Greater San Diego Vision reports that the "average San Diego household spends 33 percent of its income on housing- more than Los Angeles (31 percent), Miami (30 percent) or New York (29 percent).

In the next 40 years, the region will grow by 40 percent, or 1.3 million people; 500,000 jobs and 397,000 homes will be needed to accomodate this growth, according to the "Our Greater San Diego Vision" project.

"With the region poised to grow 40 percent in the next 40 years- close to adding the current population of San Diego- we need to mount a successful planning effort now to preserve the quality of life we love for future generations," sad Bill Geppart, chairman of Our Greater San Diego Vision.

The second step was to create a council of more than 100 community leaders and set up task forces to focus on specific parts of the vision.

These workshop (Santee's was one of six around the county) are step three in coming up with this shared vision.

The fourth step will give the broader public a chance to help narrow down the vision, hoping to include tens of thousands of residents in a broad range of civic engagement.

The cohesive vision will be presented to the public in spring of 2012, and the San Diego Foundation plans on continually updating it with the help of a new Center for Civic Engagement that the Foundation is founding.

Attendees at the Santee workshop had an East County bend and even included La Mesa Mayor Art Madrid.

There are still three workshops happening Wednesday night and Thursday, .

Of the 1,000 surveyed, most valued most in the San Diego region are recreational options, convenience, friendly people, sense of community and proximity to colleges.