TRAVERSE CITY—Next week, The Grand Vision, the Traverse area’s citizen-based planning project that has so far drawn about 1,500 participants to its wide-open workshops, takes a major step toward it’s ultimate goal: building a vision for the six-county region’s future land use and transportation.

That is when the Grand Vision team hosts the first two of five workshops in and for the counties neighboring Grand Traverse County. On Wednesday, May 7, the Vision team will host a workshop in Kalkaska County; the next night, the team moves on to Leelanau County. Then, at the end of the month, the team will host three more workshops, in Antrim and Wexford Counties on May 27, and in Benzie County on May 28.

We took a video camera to The Grand Vision’s most recent workshop, which was held in March at the Grand Traverse County Civic Center. The session focused exclusively on deciding how the state should spend its highway and transit dollars in all six counties over the next 50 years. We confirmed what the Vision team so often claims: when it comes to community planning, politics don’t matter very much. It’s all about quality of life.

Glenn Puit is the Michigan Land Use Institute’s Emmet County policy specialist. Reach him at glenn@mlui.org.