2012 Bicentennial Citizen Summit Draws Largest Community Meeting Crowd in Columbus’ History
Over 1,600 participants registered for the Columbus Bicentennial Citizen Summit in advance and 250 people registered on-site the night of the ACP-facilitated event, marking the largest community meeting ever to take place in the City of Columbus. The event brought a broad cross-section of the public together to think big and think creatively about the future of the 225 square mile City and its neighborhoods.
The Citizen Summit was one in a series of public involvement steps that ACP has facilitated for the City of Columbus—the 15th largest city in the nation. The input received at the Summit, largely garnered utilizing keypad response technology, refined the more than 10,000 comments already logged through other public outreach efforts such as the Youth Forum and College Symposium. This unprecedented amount of public input will help guide the 2012 Commissions in their work to shape a transformational vision for the future of the City, supported with a potential $1 billion Bicentennial Bond Package to ensure the projects and capital initiatives developed through the vision become a reality by 2012, the City’s 200th birthday.
The 2012 Commission is headed by incoming Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee, the Rev. Timothy J. Clarke of First Church of God, and Columbus Coalition Against Family Violence founder Abigail Wexner.