13 PlanMaryland Public Forums Held Across the State

On June 16th, the Maryland Department of Planning completed 13 public meetings, or Public Forums, throughout the state. Public Forums were held weekly from March through June of 2010.

Hundreds of people participated in these meeting to help create a plan for a better and more sustainable future for Maryland. Attendees gathered around tables of up to 8 people to enable group discussions for sharing attitudes and opinions about Maryland's 12 Planning Visions. Table groups discussed three of the visions that were of most importance to their communities and answered these questions:

1. What is working with this vision? Why is it important to you or your community?
2. What is not working with this vision? Is this concern unique to your community?
3. What are some solutions to these issues? What can be done to fix these problems? Who should participate in the solution?

Following the table discussions, each group was given the opportunity to share their table's findings with the larger group.

The input we received at these forums is invaluable to the PlanMaryland process. MDP is in the process of analyzing the comments and input from the public forums. We will publish a detailed report of this analysis and of each forum the summer of 2010. Our interim status reports are available on the right of this page in the box titles Reports.

The next steps in the process are to develop strategies and recommendations based on all input so far (the public forums, stakeholder interviews and other outreach) and then to prepare a preliminary draft plan. The draft plan will be the subject of our second phase of public meetings.

Click here to read the Public Forums status report.

See also the article Hundreds of Marylanders Turned Out for PlanMaryland Forums This Spring

What We Are Hearing?

The publication, "PlanMaryland: What we're hearing," is a summary of the group discussions and other input from the attendees of all 13 PlanMaryland Public Forums. To read the more detailed report of comments recorded by staff at the forums, see the links below. 'PlanMaryland - What we're hearing'.

Public Forums Conducted and Comments Posted

The following are the dates and location of these 13 forums. The public comments collected from each forum are posted next to each location.

   View PlanMaryland Public Forums in a larger map
   This map provided by third party

Information and Agenda

PlanMaryland Public Forums started at 6:00 p.m. The first hour was an open house which provided attendees an opportunity to meet and talk to State agency and local government staff and others. The main forum began at 7:00 p.m. Below is the agenda for each forum.

6:00 p.m.    Registration
6:30 p.m.    PlanMaryland Open House
7:00 p.m.    Forum begins - Welcome by College President or his/her designee
7:05 p.m.    Review of agenda and purpose of forum  
7:20 p.m.    Forum Demographics - An interactive "Keypad polling" activity
7:30 p.m.    Table Exercise - Small groups of 8 people will share what is most important about their community and the state
8:15 p.m.    Bringing it together - Tables share ideas with the whole forum
8:35 p.m.    Some next steps
8:40 p.m.    Closing remarks
9:00 p.m.    Meeting ends