Kittitas County is located on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains, approximately 85 miles east of Seattle along Interstate 90. It is composed of five small, rural communities, Cle Elum (pop. 1,755), South Cle Elum (pop. 504) and Roslyn (pop. 1,017), located in the "Upper County," and, Ellensburg (pop. 15,414) and Kittitas (pop. 1,105), located in the "Lower County," (U.S. Bureau, US Census 2000). Over the past 5 years, the Upper County has attracted a considerable amount of attention with respect to the issue of Community Planning. In 1996, Jeld-Wen, a millwork and specialty wood manufacturing firm based in Klamath Falls, Oregon, purchased 7,400 acres from Plum Creek Timber Company with the intention of developing the land for a resort. This development would be the largest proposed in the history of Kittitas County, and the first master planned resort (MPR) to be processed under the state Growth Management Act (GMA), enacted in the early 1990s (1998, Kittitas County Planning Department). Roslyn, Cle Elum and South Cle Elum will certainly be impacted by the development, which is also likely to have a profound influence on land use across the entire county as the resort becomes a catalyst for further development.

Historically, these two communities, for the most part, have depended upon the coal mining and logging industries to generate the majority of their revenue. The last coal mine closed in the 1960's and since that time the communities have existed as small tourist/service centers to the surrounding region. The City of Roslyn gained renewed interest in the early 1990's, when the hit television series, North Exposure, decided to use Roslyn as its live set.

Photo 1: The Roslyn Miner's Memorial was built to pay respect to those who died in the mines.	Photo 2: The Brick Tavern built in 1898 also played a major role in the story line of "Northern Exposure." It's the oldest operating saloon in the state of Washington, complete with running water spitton.

The show boosted the local economy with an infusion of tourists, but in turn, also upset some residents with the disruption of the 'small town lifestyle'. It could be said that Roslyn is destined for infamy as it is, now again, the focus of many articles, detailing the potential positive/negative impacts the Master Planned Resort may have upon the 'small town lifestyle', once it is established.

At this point in time, the Upper County has all the ingredients for explosive urban growth. Aside from attracting vacationers and the workforce required to service these temporary visitors, individuals are beginning to view the Upper County's location as an attractive place to live. Geographically, it is a gateway through the Cascade mountain range to Seattle and its burgeoning suburbs, and many now recognize the benefits of commuting. Historically, the Upper County has attracted residents because of its large, broad sweeping, open spaces and splendid views of the mountains. Land use in the Upper County has predominantly been of an agricultural or rangeland nature, sparsely populated with the small communities listed above. However, locals have long predicted the eastward flood of Seattle suburbia would eventually spill over the mountains into Kittitas Valley as wealthy city folks seek space to retire, invest, or play on the weekends. The master planned resort may well be the last element required for rapid population growth in this region. The ramifications of unplanned, accelerated growth in such a rural area have the potential to be far reaching. Upper County communities could be faced with intense demands placed upon their supplies of water, electricity, agricultural lands, public utilities and social infrastructures.

If we accept the significance of the MPR and its potential to influence rapid development throughout the county, it would appear critical that we should hasten to develop and apply community planning tools that may provide timely information to planners, resource managers, land preservationists, surrounding communities, and other stakeholders. Figure 1, below, illustrates the focus and extent of this project.

Fig.1: Upper Kittitas County. MPR (Master Planned Resort) and UGA (Urban Growth Area) property extents in comparison to the surrounding communities. (Click to enlarge)

The communities of Roslyn and Cle Elum are approaching the MPR with a high level of caution. Residents of both towns have concerns revolving around the issues of water supply, soil erosion, sewage/waste water management and treatment, preservation of green-spaces, and wetland protection. The MPR has settled on 3,785 housing units to be constructed at full build-out.

Photo 3: Golf Course Construction has commenced on the MPR Property, along with Lodge/Restaurant locations.

In response to this substantial population increase, citizens have raised many concerns including impacts the development may have on social and economic resources such as real estate values, housing supply, employment, traffic corridors and regional school systems. Within the Trendwest Properties: Cle Elum Urban Growth Area, Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), March 2002, all concerns raised by public and private interest groups have been seriously evaluated. Plans and procedures have been devised, by the Developing Agency, to mitigate the impacts the MPR may have upon each of the above concerns, in the hope of reducing the negative impacts the MPR may have on the surrounding communities' resources and aesthetics.

Fig 2: Lodge and Restaurant sketch diagram. The slope shown below will be graded back to 15 degrees as the diagram illustrates.

Photo 4

Having accepted that the MPR will proceed, the main concern now is what associated secondary growth will occur once the MPR is in place. The above concerns all have a level of uncertainty associated with them. It is this high level of uncertainty that creates a need for the development of community planning models. These models can allow all stakeholders the ability to foresee the impacts new developments may have on surrounding natural, social and economic resources.

The National Consortium for Rural Geospatial Innovations (RGIS) has recently been conducting research with respect to the application of community modeling software. RGIS' goal is to bring geospatial technologies and the benefits of the information age to rural America, where land is fundamental to resource-dependent economies and ways of life. It is RGIS's mission to eliminate the digital divide facing rural America by promoting the transfer of geospatial technologies to under-served rural areas. RGIS will be working closely with several Kittitas County interest groups, each having varying perspectives with respect to community development. Included in the group of stakeholders are the Cities of Cle Elum and Roslyn, Trendwest Developments, and Central Washington Land Trust (CWLT). At present, the Kittitas County Commissioners have expressed no interest in the project but we hope to encourage their participation as the project evolves.

It is believed that the application of the state-of-the-art community planning software CommunityViz will provide beneficial insight into the impacts the MPR may have upon the surrounding communities of the Upper County. By utilizing the CommunityViz community-planning model, interested parties will have the opportunity to incorporate their issues of concern into the model. By integrating these interests, a comprehensive community development plan will be developed, which can provide an appropriate representation of the concerns raised during the stages of model development.

Generally, GIS technology has tended to exclude officials and private citizens from fully participating in the planning process. Citizens are kept at a distance because GIS tools require skilled technicians to manipulate keyboard and display controls. The development of CommunityViz has been sponsored by the Orton Family Foundation as a means to engage planners, officials, and citizens in shaping the growth of their communities. CommunityViz is an integrated suite of tools for community planning, packaged as ArcView extensions. ESRI's ArcView 3.2 was chosen by the Orton Foundation because of its widespread use among the planning agencies in small cities, towns and rural communities (Faber and Whyte, 2002). It has been designed for community planning and natural resource management applications.

The software enables planners to create and explore "what if" scenarios based on specific regional data. CommunityViz is part of a growing group of Planning Support Systems, which allows planners the opportunity to explore the implications of land-use alternatives. The ramifications of each alternative can be communicated through three different perspectives such as the Analytical, which assesses the direct impacts of specified proposed change. For example, what will be the impact on the Total Town Water Consumption Rate if a new residential development is implemented on the north side of town? The second perspective is a Predictive one which investigates long term implications. For example, what impact will a new residential development have upon land values on the north side of town, over the next 30 years? The last perspective involves the Visual element, which takes on the form of 3D interactive representations of how the proposed changes might appear. CommuntyViz is very attractive to Land-use and Community Planners because it includes all three of the above planning perspectives into one multi-dimensional environment using the following modules: Scenario Constructor (Analytical perspective), Policy Simulator (Predictive perspective) and Site Builder 3D (Visualization component) (Faber and Whyte, 2002).

With Scenario Constructor the user has the ability to interactively sketch land use scenarios and to evaluate those scenarios against project objectives and constraints. It supports impact analysis, indicator tracking and alternative comparison. See Figure 2 for illustration.

Policy Simulator uses agent-based modeling techniques to simulate likely future impacts of community planning proposals, providing planners with a view of likely economic and demographic outcomes years into the future.

SiteBuilder 3D enables users to build photo-realistic, three dimensional, interactive models of their land-use proposals. Once built, the models allow virtual 'fly-through' demonstrations and exploration, giving users the ability to visualize land-use proposals and even change them in real-time (Orton Family Foundation, 2002). See an example of its 3D demonstration capabilities.

Figure 3, below, illustrates how all three components of CommunityViz, can work in conjunction with one another to enable simultaneous evaluation of visual, analytical, and projected implications of land planning alternatives.

Fig 3. (Click to enlarge)

The power of the software lies in the integration of all three planning perspectives into one multi-dimensional environment. Exploration of alternative land proposals can take place within a combination of any of the three modules. Changes made to the data in one component are automatically reflected in the other two components. All modules can be accessed simultaneously, which allows the user to move easily between multiple methods of evaluation. It is because of the versatility of CommunityViz brings to Model development, that members of the GIS and Land-use Planning disciplines have begun to focus a keen eye on the capabilities the software can provide, with specific respect to proactive policy analysis and project assessment (for more information see Geoworld Review, B. Culpepper, 2002).

By utilizing this advanced modeling approach, RGIS will create and analyze alternative land-use scenarios, visualize their impacts in real time 3D models and analyze development policies and their impacts over time for the Upper County region. RGIS believes that this is an excellent opportunity to illustrate the benefits of applying the CommunityViz software by showcasing the GIS technology to all levels of the Kittitas community. At this stage a pilot model is under development, which will attempt to model the different alternatives presented in the MPR proposal and their specific impacts on water consumption, wastewater production and municipal waste production. CommunityViz Scenario Constructor will be utilized to create multiple scenarios, which will be evaluated against project objectives and constraints outlined in the MountainStar MPR Environmental Impact Statement. The CommunityViz SiteBuilder 3D module will be utilized to develop three-dimensional representations of each scenario created. Stakeholders will be given the opportunity to move through these virtual scenes allowing them to explore the visual impacts of each scenario. During the following months, the community model will continue to be developed, becoming more comprehensive in scope. Over this period of time workshops will be held to develop interest in the software's capabilities and to educate interested parties with respect to the community planning process. Stakeholders will be given the opportunity to raise issues and concerns that they would like to see included in the construction of the community model. In this way, all interested groups will have the ability to help shape and direct the community model throughout the development life cycle.

Simultaneous to the application of the CommunityViz planning software, a study will be conducted to assess the participants' perceptions of the model's effectiveness in the decision-making process. Throughout the series of workshops, individuals will have the opportunity to learn more about the modeling approach, contribute to the model's design, and provide useful feedback to RGIS to help guide the model's development. It is the hope of the RGIS staff that, once awareness has been developed, communities in Kittitas County will take an increased interest in how their communities, surrounding environment and resources are shaped, and how they can participate in modeling their County's future.

There has been much research conducted to determine how models like CommunityViz predict the future and how close to reality the predictions are, but little has been done to evaluate their roles in the decision-making process. Community participation is an important component of making policy decisions, yet, without an understanding of a project or its projected impacts on the communities in which it is implemented, there is potential for a breakdown within the decision-making process. Some of the barriers to public participation may include lack of information or information that is inaccessible, arguments based on emotional appeals rather than facts, and domination of public meetings by a vocal minority fighting for a specific cause.

Research on CommunityViz's influence to the participatory process is based on the assumption that CommunityViz has the potential to be effective in providing the general public, project coordinators, County staff, and other interested individuals with complex, dynamic information that is easy to understand and visualize. "It is important to help participants recognize the weaknesses in a particular case and the alternative ways to test the assumptions behind a point of view (Barndt, 1998)." With more complete knowledge of the project and potential impacts to socio-economic and environmental factors, it is projected that decisions will be made more frequently on facts than emotional appeals.

Objectives of this research are to:

• Apply CommunityViz to a situation of local significance (the MountainStar MPR) that involves the community and local government in the decision-making process.
• Identify the strengths and weaknesses of CommunityViz as a tool for decision making, based on feedback from workshop participants.
• Determine how useful this model is as a tool for making informed decisions.

If CommunityViz is successful, as our assumptions predict, the implications are far-reaching. Local governments or community groups may wish to adopt the model in order to assess potential impacts to the environment, examine development alternatives, or determine the effects proposed policy changes might have on communities. In doing so, better communication between local governments and the people they serve is fostered and information is more easily accessible.

Barndt, M. 1998. Public Participation GIS - Barriers to Implementation. Cartography and Geographic Information Systems. (25) 2: 105-112.

City of Cle Elum. 2002. Trendwest Properties: Cle Elum UGA Final EIS. City of Cle Elum, Cle Elum Washington.

Culpepper, B. 2002. Review: CommunityViz 1.3. Geoworld. October, 2002.

CommunityViz. 2002. CommunityViz Version 1.3: User Manual. The Orton Family Foundation.

Faber, G.B. and H. Whyte. 2002. CommunityViz: Multi-Faceted Community Planning: Impacts, Forecast, and 3D Visualization. 2002 URISA Conference Proceedings.

Kittitas County Planning Department. 1998. Scoping Report: MountainStar Master Planned Resort Environmental Impact Statement. Kittitas County Planning Department, Kittitas County, Washington.

Washington State Office of Financial Management. 2000. U.S. Census 2000, Washington State.