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Lake County, Ohio hadn’t had a countywide comprehensive plan in 60 years. Twenty-three separate cities, villages, and townships sit inside its borders, most of the land already built out, and the county government’s own role in local planning is easy for residents to overlook. For Envision, the Cleveland-based firm leading the plan, reaching people who’d never thought about what the county actually does was the real project.
A county residents don’t really see
Lake County sits along Lake Erie just east of Cleveland: 1960s suburban streets on the west end, subdivisions from the 80s and 90s in the middle, and still-rural land with nurseries and wineries to the east. Envision had already tried the standard outreach playbook — booths at community festivals, boards and slideshows at public meetings — and turnout stayed thin. Ryan Smalley, principal at Envision, put it plainly: “it’s hard to get the word out. It’s hard to get people to understand what this is and why it’s important to get their feedback.” With the county’s first plan in six decades, Envision needed a way to reach residents across all 23 jurisdictions, not just the ones who show up to an evening meeting.
Making the plan visible
Alongside the survey, Envision built a Maptionnaire-hosted project website that tracked the plan in public as it happened — the schedule, upcoming public events, and every chance for a resident to review and weigh in. QR codes linking to the survey went up at festivals and other high-traffic spots around the county to drive people online, and the survey itself ran from June 15 to August 22, covering housing, economic development, parks and recreation, and community amenities.
We wanted to utilize Maptionnaire not only for a survey to get initial feedback on goals and objectives, but also to put a website together to keep everybody in the county updated on the progress of the plan: the schedule, public events, chances to review the plan. That was very helpful in spreading the word about the plan to the public.
Ryan Smalley, Principal, Envision
For residents who couldn’t describe what the county actually does, the page gave them something concrete to look at instead of a vague sense that “the county is planning something.”
Housing: mapping where types should go, not just asking
On housing specifically, Envision combined satisfaction questions, multiple-choice and ranked-priority questions on housing types, with location-based mapping questions asking residents where different kinds of housing should go. The location-based questions corrected an assumption instead of confirming it. Jacob Bean, of Envision: “There’s actually a pretty decent amount of individuals interested in seeing a mixture of housing types in all sorts of areas… it can help break down some of those potential biases or inferences that might not fully be accurate.”
The team also ran an open mapping exercise where residents dropped pins on specific opportunity areas and commented directly on them — the same exercise Envision runs in person, translated online.
The mapping exercises give us the opportunity to do things we do in physical public meeting settings, and to replicate that online is really invaluable, especially with the GIS functions integrated into it.
Jacob Bean, Envision
What the survey changed
The survey drew 2,068 total responses, most from residents living in or adjacent to the county — a strong return for a county-level comprehensive plan. Forty percent of respondents were dissatisfied or unsure about current housing options, a gap the plan had to address directly. And the location-based questions surfaced real appetite for mixed housing types in the county’s rural areas, going against a stakeholder assumption that rural residents would resist density.
Survey responses, cross-referenced by location, fed directly into a geographic typologies map that grouped jurisdictions by character and assigned specific housing recommendations — accessory dwelling units in some areas, transit-oriented development in others — to the places where they made the most sense. Housing came out as the most locally varied of the plan’s six focus areas: recommendations that fit the dense west end wouldn’t have made sense for the rural east, and the mapped survey data made that difference visible early, before it became a fight at a public hearing.
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