Levels Of Workshops

The Blueprint workshop series began at the neighborhood level. Each city or county hosted one workshop in their area highlighting two or more case study areas. Citizens worked in small groups performing interactive planning using computers and table maps. The computer program modeled the impacts of choices made in a "what if" type exercise. The case study sites were chosen by local planners and focused on one site that is already developed in some manner, but could accommodate changes or updates, and one site in an undeveloped portion of the city or county. More than 30 neighborhood scale workshops were held in all parts of the region, giving more than one thousand citizens the opportunity to express their preferences for various types of planning solutions.

Once completed, the collective input of all the neighborhood workshops was used to create scenarios for five counties in the region (El Dorado County did not participate at this level of the Blueprint Workshops due to legal issues surrounding the General Plan). These scenarios showed potential development patterns for the entire county and was developed by teams of planners from each local government in the county working together.

The county scenarios started another series of workshops, where citizens worked with maps and computer programs to give input for countywide development.

This process repeated itself a third time, again with the region's planners working together, to create scenarios for the entire six county region. Regional workshop participants worked on region-wide maps and saw the impacts of change as the computer program provided performance statistics for their choices.

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