Comprehensive Plan Committee prepares to send survey to residents

by Emily Canning-Dean

Since May 2025, a committee has been meeting nearly every month to update the township’s comprehensive plan, and the next step of the process, township officials say, is gathering feedback from the community.

“The comprehensive plan committee has developed a set of survey questions that will be going out to the community in anticipation of the update/rewrite of the comprehensive plan,” Township Trustee President Cindy Engleman said. “The last full comprehensive plan update was in 2015, so we are due for one. There have been many changes throughout the community in that time. The whole point of the plan is to be a guide and to frame what direction we should be heading.”

During an Aug. 4 meeting, the board of trustees unanimously approved a motion to accept the committee’s recommendation to distribute the survey throughout the township.

Trustees said they hope to receive a higher response rate than they did with the survey for the 2015 comprehensive plan update.

The committee will allow residents nearly a month to fill out the survey and turn it in, and Engleman recommended getting the word out not only by word of mouth, but possibly also putting an advertisement in The Hinckley Record to remind residents of the importance of the survey. Engleman said she expects surveys will be sent to residents in mid- to late September.

Committee members said the surveys will be in paper form and mailed out instead of allowing an electronic option.

“We talked about an electronic survey, but we didn’t want someone to get on and do 25 surveys at one time or have someone who isn’t even a Hinckley resident respond,” a committee member said at the trustees meeting.

Trustee Tom Schrader asked why the committee asked demographic questions in the survey.

“Just playing devil’s advocate, what if the person aggregating the results of the survey gives some answers more weight than others,” he said. “What if a resident who is 21-30 and has lived here for less than three years is given less weight with their answers than someone who has been here for 30 years and is older than 50.”

A committee member said that was not the intent of collecting demographic information. He said it is just an opportunity to understand the situation of the people who are participating in the survey and added that demographic information is often included in surveys.

Even once the surveys are returned, Engleman said the committee will have a lot of work ahead of them. They will meet again Sept. 23, Oct. 21, Nov. 18 and Dec. 16. The next step will be analyzing the data from the surveys.

Engleman added that she learned from Denise Testa, Medina County planning services director, that a planning grant is available to communities in Medina County.

“The maximum for this grant is $5,000 and it requires a 50% match, but this is one of the things we talked about in the committee,” she said. “As the responses from the survey come in, it might be worthwhile to bring in an advisor to help with analyzing the data and help with the plan writing.”

Engleman said she would have resolutions prepared for the next board of trustees meeting that would allow the township to apply for the grant.

“Whenever the funds are awarded, we would have two years to use them,” she said.