Thank you to Joe Barker for inviting me to join his Rural Strong podcast this week.
“John Shepard, If you fail to plan, plan to fail! Our guest on the RuralStrong podcast is John Shepard, a seasoned planning and economic development professional at Marvin Planning Consultants. John has over 30 years of experience across the Midwest and Great Plains and is a prominent voice in small-town and rural planning. Listen as John discusses his career and gives real-life examples of successful rural planning. Every successful business story begins with a plan. John explains how communities can become vibrant with a well-thought-out plan and dedicated implementation!”
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Here’s the full transcript. Joe Barker in standard text, John Shepard in italics.
Rural Strong — Season 1 Episode 36
Welcome to Rural Strong, where we talk real challenges and bold solutions in rural economic development. I’m your host, Joe Barker. Let’s get into it.
Welcome to Rural Strong. We’re broadcasting today from the Southwest Tennessee Development District podcast studio in beautiful downtown Jackson, Tennessee.
Our guest today is John Shepard. And I’ve been really looking forward to having uh John on our program. John is a seasoned planning and economic development professional at Marvin Planning Consultants with over 30 years of experience across the Midwest and Great Plains. He is a prominent voice in small town and rural planning. Currently serving on the American Planning Association Small Town and Rural Planning division board. John, welcome to Rural Strong.
Thank you, Joe. I appreciate it.
Well, you know, I’m going to tell you in a in a prior lifetime when I worked for the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development, at that time the state of Tennessee had a planning division and cities and counties actually contracted with the planning division at the state to provide their local planning services. That division came under me. I thoroughly enjoyed the time I was there working with those planners watching as communities evolved and the things that they prioritized.
The first thing I want to ask you about and get your thoughts on is, you know not everybody thinks planning is necessary. In fact, when I was working for the state, I had several people tell me that this is a complete waste of time. So, for someone who’s made a career of planning, what’s your thoughts on the importance of planning?
Well, I take a I took a lot of my interest in planning actually from my grandfather who was a farmer in the state of Michigan and he had a diversified farm. He had all sorts of different types of fruit. He had an apple orchard, a vineyard. He grew crops to feed to the cows that he had a dairy operation. He had an annual plan that he constantly worked on adjusting it both to the economic conditions of the time and to what was best given the land that was there. That influenced me when I was looking at a career and I wanted to help people, help communities out, help people like my grandfather.
My approach to planning is really that, well, if you don’t care where you’re going, it doesn’t matter what your plan is. But if you want to improve where you’re at, you better have a plan. We work with a lot of different types of communities, but mostly smaller towns and rural counties, some regions across the United States, and this crosses back over to economic development. If you have a new idea, say you want to start a new business, you go to the bank, you want to get, you know what, you want to get some funding, they’re going to ask you, “What’s your business plan? Who are your customers? What are you selling? How much are they willing to pay for it? Can you make a profit?” A community plan is really just a business plan for the community. Who are your customers? Who are the people who live there? They’re making a choice every day whether they’re going to want to stay living there. What is your product? What are you doing for your community? What are you going to do for those people in the future?
I grew up during the Cold War and the infamous Soviet 5-year plan, which as we all know was a wasn’t very successful. Thank goodness. That’s not where planning is in America today. It never really was.
Planning is just doing what we’ve done since people started building communities on purpose—where you know what you have, know where you want to go, and figure out how to get there.
You know, I couldn’t agree more, John, and I’ve probably told this story before on another podcast, but when I went to work for the state of Tennessee, coming from a rural community, think the governor looked on me to probably advise him the best I could on rural communities and some of their needs. And I’d been in Nashville about 2 weeks and I had a phone call and I was asked to come over to the capitol, that the governor wanted to talk to me. The governor had just been elected, and was the former mayor of Nashville. Great guy, highly intelligent, but quite frankly knew nothing about rural communities. And so I went in and we talked a minute or two and he looked at me and he said, “I’ve got a question for you, Joe.
“How many of our rural communities have a plan?” And there’s very few times I don’t know what to say, but I looked at him and I said, “You know, Governor, I’m sure a few do, but I’m confident to say that the majority do not.” And as I said, he was a very successful businessman. And he looked at me and he said, “I’m going to tell you, Joe, I know of no business that’s ever been successful that didn’t have a plan. How in the world can we expect our rural communities to be successful without a plan?” And that stuck with me and it’s just exactly what you’re saying is that to me planning is part of that foundation of building a vibrant community.
As you work across the Midwest, what do you see maybe are the greatest obstacles for communities to get involved in successful planning?
I think the biggest thing is simply, “plan” is a four-letter word. “Zone” is a four-letter word. A lot of people confuse zoning with planning. They are
not the same thing. Zoning implements planning, but frankly, zoning is tangible. People understand how high I can build my fence or, how many cars do I have to have parking for? You can touch those. You can feel those.
The plan is about what do we want to be? It’s yes, very much rainbows and puppy dog tails, but again, if you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter how you get there.
A lot of the community resistance to planning simply goes back to this perception that a plan is big government telling you what to do. It’s never been that way. Well, at least outside of, you know, New York City.
I’m sure you see a lot of this in your work with the regional development organizations and across the country that rural planning and development is not urban development writ small. It’s different.
Now, there are principles of how places and economies work that are universal. But that said, every place is different. You’ve been to one small town, you’ve been to one small town. But people get hung up that, they think, “Oh, we have to have this big complicated planning system for my town of 5,000 people.” You know, we’re working with one village that’s got 24 people on a good day. They need a much different planning process than a city of a quarter million.
So, first off, you have to plan for the community you have. And that’s what we try to do, what I’ve tried to do through my career. I’ve mostly worked with the smaller places.
But it’s really important to take those universal principles and apply it to the place you’re at. You know, there’s no reason that David City, Nebraska, should try to be Detroit. They’re completely different places. So, we have to craft our plans and our planning to fit the place we’re at. That’s hard.
I’ve had people ask me, if I want a county plan, why don’t I just take somebody else’s and cut and paste it? We’re seeing it and actually it’s a little disturbing. You’re starting to see people using AI just to crank stuff out. And you know, if you just want to copy paste somebody else’s work, you’re going to get the results of somebody else’s work.
You know it’s not going to be appropriate for your community. You do that through putting some effort in it. But just getting over that, what do we do to start? That’s the toughest thing. And I’ve heard some of the folks that you’ve talked to on the podcast, they have some really good ideas about how do we get over that hump and try things? The best way to learn what works is to try something, observe, and then try the next thing. You know, you have to start somewhere.
Let me ask you this. the type of planning you’re referring to, I guess I refer to as asset-based planning, where you’ve got a community. I’m a firm believer that no matter the size of the town or city, we all have particular assets that we can build on and take advantage of. Is that asset-based planning in your mind or is that something totally different?
It’s an approach. I’ve heard folks talk about that. I think it’s something that you can adapt to your community that really what we were looking at is figure out what you’ve got, figure out where people want to go and how do we help them get there. Again, the traditional idea of the big plan that came out of the 1950s and 60s was, somebody on top is going to tell you what to do. It’s the same idea. Somebody from the outside is going to come in and save our town.
No. No. Think George Bailey, It’s a Wonderful Life. You get the plan. You figure out what you want to do and you build it from the ground up. You figure out who are the assets in your community. What do you have? What do they need? And figure out how to do it.
So, we need to do planning to understand where we’re at, but we can’t do the analysis paralysis. So, there has to be this balance between having a plan and doing things.
Now, doing things is great. Just random action sometimes randomly works, but you’re not going to have a good return on investment if you’re not somewhat systematic about how you apply those assets to your environment and to the community. It’s a balancing act.
And a lot of our planning schools are much more focused on how that works in big cities and suburbs. We had a generation of planners and people like Joe Luther at the University of Nebraska, they came from rural areas and helped train students in planning and development and design that understood how smaller communities work.
We don’t necessarily have those leaders today. The leadership is coming from people like you at the regional development organizations, at Aspen Institute, at Brookings. They’re people coming from all different aspects that are saying, “Hey, wait a minute. Rural communities work in an urban environment, but they’re very different places and we need to figure out how to be more effective in that environment.
It is tough work, but it’s why the regional development organizations, other folks doing the work you’re doing are so important um in these communities. Its just they want to do something, but where do you turn?
Let me ask you this, John. when you go into a community that’s maybe asked you to come in and talk about the planning process, what are the first basic steps you lead them through that maybe gives them a concept of what they need to accomplish.
Most of our work is in comprehensive planning, economic development, and we do some of that implementation with zoning and that and really we look at how we need to go through a process.
So, first is to understand where you’re coming from. Let’s look at your demographics. Let’s look at your statistics. The census data isn’t great for rural communities, but pretty much American Community Survey is the best we’ve got. As long as you understand there’s larger margin of error. For that community of 24 people, it’s the best we’ve got. But you still need to look at what the data says, compare it to your area around, and look at benchmarking your peers.
But also then you need to fact check that data. That’s where your qualitative community engagement comes in. So, there’s what the numbers say and there’s what the people say and you need to understand where they are.
Then look at your other assets in the community, your community facilities, your schools, your natural resources, your parks and rec.
Let’s look at your economic development. Economic development is a big part of what we do because everything else comes around that. Anymore um if you’re trying to retain your population, the younger population has different expectations. We see that in housing a lot. It used to be everybody, oh, you can move to a small town and find a house for cheap. First house I bought when I lived in North Dakota, I paid more for my new car than I paid for that house. You couldn’t do that again today because even in our rural communities, they’re facing as much of a housing crisis.
The problem is you can’t build a new house for what it’s going to pencil out for today. So, you can’t afford to build a new house. We need to take those data points, your population, your housing, your economic development, compare that to your qualitative data, your community engagement, look at your infrastructure, your again community facilities, your schools, your parks and recreation, communications, utilities.
We spend a lot of time in our area talking about energy, renewable energy. A lot of conflict around that right now, but it all ends up in land use and transportation. Roads, as you know, have more of an impact to land use than most anything a land use planner is going to do.
But you look at all that and what I can’t emphasize enough in rural development, the plan is not the government telling you what to do with your property. The plan is you telling the government what you want to do to make have an investment-backed expectation. What is it going to take for you to invest your blood, sweat, and tears in that community? Because, frankly, if the government can’t provide the services, people aren’t going to stick around.
Every day is a day for local community leaders to sell their community to the people who are already there because if the people who are there don’t care passionately about your community, why would anybody else?
Absolutely. And you know, John, a few weeks ago I was talking with Becky McCray and we were talking a little bit about planning and Becky is a wealth of knowledge and one thing we talked about with planning and having these documents when they’re put together is that, I made the comment I think sometimes local leaders need to buy an extra bookshelf shelf because they have all these plans and all these other things and they go on a bookshelf somewhere and uh all the preparation and work that went into preparing that plan is really not worth much if you don’t have implementation.
So let’s shift gears a little bit; we’ve talked about the planning process. Let’s talk about the implementation process and how important that is in rural planning.
I dropped a line that that she picked up years ago, “implementation is the watch word”.
As a planner, I saw too many of my plans end up on a shelf that people didn’t get interested until you started talking about those tangible benefits. How does this mean for zoning? What does this mean for a grant? What does this mean for a new subdivision?
I’ve tried to flip my planning practice to think about, how is this going to be implemented and that’s hard and frankly as the world has become much more complicated our plans have gotten thicker because anything that you do has to be supported in your plan and in a world of lawyers you better not regulate something if you don’t have a rational basis in your plan. If you want to regulate battery energy storage systems, you better address it in your plan somewhere.
But as we’re doing that, we try to focus on the “so-what”, that how do battery energy storage systems fit within the particulars of this rapidly changing industry, within the expectations of your community.
That’s part of a discussion about all things utility—between your employers, your utility providers, your folks who want to have leases, the people who don’t want to live next to an industrial landscape.
These are discussions going on all over the country. And if you want to be able to implement solutions like having regulations for renewable energy that are going to stand up in court, satisfy the neighbors, and still provide enough energy for new jobs and industry, that has to have your basis in planning.
One thing that that I would like to do better on our projects is being more incremental. A lot of times people think, “Oh, a 20-year plan.” We had a client that had a plan from the early 1970s. You remember when HUD funded those big thick plans that were written on a typewriter back in the day? They were still using it. Well, the trends hadn’t changed a whole lot there. Unfortunately they weren’t growing a lot, but things were changing in that community, and there they finally got to the point where, you know, maybe after 50 years we need a new plan.
That plan—especially in today’s world of desktop publishing—a plan should be a living breathing document that focuses on what do we do about it? How are you going to implement this plan? How are you going to bring it to life?
I’ll give you one example. We’re working with a firm, MSA, on a project in Greenfield, Iowa. This small town was hit really, really hard by a tornado about two years ago, took a wide swath through the south end of town. It was just devastating.
Well, MSA came up with an approach. They needed a plan and they needed something fast. So, they came up with the idea of doing a web-based plan. They had a series of community engagement sessions with a combination of in-person and remote. And they did the plan through ESRI StoryMaps. It’s all up there online. It can be easily updated, with the idea that if it’s not on a static piece of paper there, people are going to be more likely to tweak it.
Now, obviously, you have to go through all the legally required public hearings to change the plan. It just happens to be in HTML instead of a Word doc. That worked for that community. Their local leaders have gone through a lot. It’s been really, really hard and stressful on staff, on people in the community. They’ve got a cracker jack new city administrator who is committed to bringing this to life, but part of that is keeping that plan evergreen, not just having a pretty picture on the wall.
MSA’s got some good graphics, folks. They made some pretty pictures, but the idea is let’s make this a living document.
Now, of course, is I get to come in with the zoning afterwards, and this is government telling what you can do, and we’re trying to match that spirit of implementation, with trying to make it easier. And sometimes zoning is easier if it’s thicker. It’s just the world that’s run by lawyers. It’s hard. We do the best we can with what we’ve got and then try to do better.
Let me ask you this. you mentioned the word “evergreen” and keeping those plans active and let’s just go back to the traditional document. Okay. That you’ve made a plan, you’ve got the document. What are your thoughts on—I’m talking about primarily like city councils—how often should this document be brought out in a city council meeting for those members of the council to be brought up to date on the things they had planned for and where they are on that timeline? How important is it that this is done on a regular basis?
If we’ve done our job right and whether as planners it’s staff or consultants or somebody from the university that’s done regularly.
I’ve seen some really neat student projects recently University of Nebraska Lincoln, University of Colorado Denver where I went, University of Illinois where I went.
I have an example, the City of Burwell Nebraska, couple thousand people. They have a really big rodeo, they’ve got a reservoir and in the summer there are just a lot of people who come from the city to this small town.
Their staff committed to doing a plan with immediate implementation through zoning, a capital improvements plan and a strategic plan on how to implement that. So, they couldn’t even find the old plan and they had two different zoning regulations and nobody was sure which one was right. Their staff walked through a number of scenarios as they came during the planning process. So, the planning commission was using the draft plan and the draft zoning regulations to evaluate proposals.
A downtown business owner wanted to add a couple storage containers in a historic district, for example. There was a lot of back and forth. Can that work? Can it not work? We’d rather have things inside than not. We came up with some criteria folks could live with. That project then became “did that do what we wanted to do?” And then they immediately started to tweak that before we did the final.
Another example with a new housing proposal. You know a lot of these towns that were railroad towns, the original platted lots were like 50 feet wide and 150 feet deep. We don’t build like that anymore. Well, on corner lots, they wanted to make it easier to combine two long narrow lots and square them off and come off the side street. But their traditional zoning with very large front setbacks wouldn’t do that. So, we sat down and drew it out and said, “Hey, could you live with these lesser setbacks so that people could actually build houses so you could keep your police officers and teachers and city staff here?”
I can’t say that was without pains, but they were using it because it was their document, not just something I gave them.
It’s always recommended that you do annual reviews. What did we do? What are we doing with this? Hey, January, if when you’re doing your election of officers, just do a quick, “We had this many projects and there’s these things. What would we like to try to do?”
One thing you don’t want to do is use the implementation as a guilt trip. We try to give people way more tools than they can possibly do. I worked for a firm, Consensus planning out of Albuquerque and my our principal there, Jackie Fishman, said that she had one time in her career when she had a community come back to her and said, “We did everything in the plan. We’re done.”
You know that you have to look at a lot of different things, but also that gives people an opportunity to pick up those things that they want to and can do because you don’t know what’s going to get funded this year. You don’t know with shifting priorities of the electorate. There’s an election every so often and priorities change.
So you what are we doing? How is this working? Do we need to tweak things that a lot of our rural communities along long range trends don’t change?
It used to be every 10 years you get a new census. Now you get a 5-year rolling census every year and you can tweak this as you go. So, yeah, you ought to update your numbers every year or every 5 years at least. But after 5 years, the world has changed… except where it hasn’t.
So, it’s a back and forth. Like I said, in this day and age, some communities are going to have staff that have capacity to do that in-house. Other folks look at consultants to do that.
I worked at the Southwest Regional Development Commission in Minnesota, one of your peer groups, Joe. It’s southwest Minnesota, near Sioux Falls. We worked with cities. We worked in counties doing comprehensive planning, zoning, for those projects that were too big for staff, but they were too small for the consultants to come in from Sioux Falls or Minneapolis. We also partnered on a couple projects with other experts who came in from other areas.
Again, look at the resources you have that fit your community. The worst thing you can do though is have a plan that sits on a shelf because you spent the money on it, make something out of it. We shouldn’t be wasting the public resources. None of us has enough money to do that.
I think exactly what you’ve been talking about, John, that our leaders need to know that these plans are fluid. Circumstances change and these plans are made to be updated. I think sometimes a lot of people give push back because they think that everything’s in stone and we can’t tweak this and as you mentioned lots of times you have new administrations come in and they have different priorities so I think that’s a great point that these plans are very fluid.
Yes. You know, there’s about 60 million people across rural America. That’s a lot of people that want a lot of different things and that that these things shift and change and we have to react to them. But at the end of the day, most people just want a place to call home.
That’s what this is really about. And it doesn’t matter if you’re in the it in the Delta, if you’re in the deep rural areas on the plains of eastern Montana, from one part of the country to the other; if you’re in the prairie provinces of Canada, or the outback of Western Australia. People want to have some sense or semblance of predictability in local government. They wanted to be treated fair and given a fair opportunity to make a living. And that’s tough. The world around us is changing. And there’s a lot of uncertainty in the world.
That’s one thing that’s nice working in local communities like we do, like the economic development districts do. We can’t do a lot about the things in the world, but we can do about how we react to those.
That requires keeping our plans up to date, trying new things. It’d be easier just to copy stuff. But you’ve got to try it, see how it works, and then try it again. Constantly changing.
In any community, they figure a certain percentages of the homes are going to become uninhabitable just because of aging. It isn’t because the houses are falling down. It’s just things happen.
So, if you don’t do anything, things are going to change. The only way you can even keep things like they are is to reinvest in your community. Whether that’s people, whether that’s houses, whether that’s economic development, the only way to keep things as they are is to change.
Well, our guest on this podcast has been John Shepard, professional planner and with a particular expertise in our small and rural communities. And John, before we go, I know you’re active on some of the social media platforms and I read a lot of your articles. If our listeners wanted to see what things that that you’re involved with, how can they do that?
Marvin Planning is online and we do a lot of work over the country. I’m also involved American Planning Association Small Town and Rural Planning Division; we have a brand new website through APA for any of those members. I’m always happy to share those. I’m on LinkedIn. I am also online, well these days I’m on blue sky at jcshepard.com which is also my blog. It’s been there a while. I do a lot of different things. I like music. I like old stuff. I like maps, but I also talk a lot about small town rural development at jcshepard.com.
I do so appreciate the opportunity to be here. I’m looking forward to more of your podcasts here.
Thanks, John, and we appreciate your time and wish you all the best, my friend. Thank you. Thanks for joining us on Rural Strong.
If you found this helpful, share it and follow the show for more insights from rural leaders making a real difference. Until next time, stay rural strong.
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