The next meetings of the Urban and Rural Steering Committees for the Portage County Bicycle and Pedestrian Planning Project will both take place on Tuesday October 1 in Conference Room 5 of the Portage County Annex Building (1462 Strongs Ave).

The Rural Steering Committee will meet from 2 – 3:30 PM and the Urban Steering Committee will meet from 4 – 5:30 PM. These meetings are both open to the general public.

Meeting info and links to the agenda packets can be found in a post on the Portage County Bike/Ped Plan website. Links to these packets can also be found below:

• Rural Steering Committee 10/1 (5.3 MB PDF)
• Urban Steering Committee 10/1 (6.6 MB PDF)

The agendas for both meetings include the following items.

The Vision, Goals, Objectives, and Policies statement for the bike/ped plan document was revised based on feedback from the Steering Committee meetings in July. The revised statement is in the agenda packets. This revised statement will be reviewed and discussed.

Also, a general update of this bike/ped plan project will be presented, and questions will be entertained. I expect this discussion will set the stage for what to expect for the remainder of this planning project due to be completed in February 2014.

Finally, a discussion of Wausau area bicycle routes and maps will take place. The agenda packets have a copy of the Wausau Area Bike Map. I know that several signed bike routes have been implemented in the past year that help people biking connect among the municipalities in the Wausau area. A comment in the agenda packets suggests that our discussion will focus on what we can learn from the project in Wausau.

I encourage Poky Pedalers interested in these items to attend either of the Steering Committee meetings on Tuesday.

Looking ahead, I have heard that in early-to-mid November, there will be another round of Steering Committee meetings where an initial draft of the bike/ped planning document will be discussed. Soon after that, this draft will be the topic of discussion at a public meeting in order to get feedback from ordinary citizens about what did or didn’t make it into the draft planning document.

Although there hasn’t been much to report on this planning project for the past few months, that is about to change in a big way. As always, I’ll use this blog to keep Poky Pedalers up to date on what’s happening and how you can voice your opinions.

If you need to catch up on what has happened to date, select the Portage County Bicycle and Pedestrian Planning Project link from the Speak Your Poky menu item above. Poky Pedalers will find lots of information, including links to all my past posts about the project.

Disclosure: Bob Fisch, Chief Bike Fun Officer of Poky Pedaling Stevens Point, is a member of the Urban Steering Committee for the Portage County Bicycle and Pedestrian Planning Project. Posts about this project appearing on the PPSP website are part of a broader PPSP effort to keep readers informed of bikey news in our area. Nothing posted on the PPSP website should be considered to be official communication from the Portage County Bicycle and Pedestrian Planning Project. The official website for this project can be accessed at http://portagecobikepedplan.wordpress.com.

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