Leading by listening: multi-disciplinary firm guides communities to consensus.

• Author: Bohi, Heidi
• Position: GENERAL - Thea Agnew-Bemben of Agnew::Beck

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Community planning often plays out like a classic Western movie: the wild and free gunfighter pulls into town, a rebellious anti-hero who stands for the lawlessness of the American West. He tides in, free from fixed social structures, bound only by his own code of honor. By the time the final curtain falls, he rescues the damsel in distress or marries the sheriff's daughter and opens a dry goods store, happy to quit wandering the plains and fighting villains, and now willing to conform to laws that protect his pretty bride and their Main Street business.

Give or take the shoot 'em up bang-bang plot, this is not that far off from what Talkeetna went through when it hired Agnew::Beck (A::B), an Anchorage-based community planning and development firm, to help deal with rapid change in this previously sleepy town. Over a series of projects, including an initial general plan, preparation of a zoning code, a parking and circulation plan and eventually a plan for using 75 acres of undeveloped riverfront property, A::B guided the local community council through issues that had become the topic of hot debate as different kinds of groups competed for use of the limited space, especially in light of the growth in tourism there. Having hosted many public workshops, the community input and divisiveness was not unusual, says Chris Beck, one of the firm's principals. There were those who were against any kind of growth and wanted rules and management that would prevent development. And there were those who wanted growth, but not the rules that typically follow development. In the end, Beck says, everyone rode off into the sunset: the final consensus was that there needed to be some growth and some management if the community was going to preserve what was important to them.

BRINGING COMMUNITIES TOGETHER

Since bringing their individual specialties under one brand in 2002, Beck and his business partner, Thea Agnew-Bemben, have worked with more than 50 businesses and communities statewide, ranging from remote Alaska Native villages to small cities on the road system and larger towns like Anchorage, helping each client figure out what it wants to be when it grows up. Adhering to the motto "resources for community," Agnew says the 13-person firm does not tell communities what they need to do. Instead, they bring groups of citizens together, help them figure out what they envision for the future, and then recommend practical strategies to...