December 2012 - Parks & Recreation - 18

frontpage
Pioneer Park in Mesa, Arizona, will be a
beneﬁciary of a successful $70 million
bond referendum.

INNOVATION

iMesa
Delivers
Parks fare well
in this innovative
community planning
tool.

I

N LATE 2010, MESA, ARIZONA, was at a crossroads, and we
needed to decide how we were going to deal with both our current ﬁnancial challenges and our future. Were we going to be in survival mode or
growth mode? In January 2011, Mayor Scott Smith introduced a tool to put us in
growth mode. iMesa issued a call to action for residents to engage in a process-
imagine, invest, improve-to " Build a Better Mesa. "
Part of the iMesa strategy is to use
technology to engage residents like
never before. iMesa uses an online
crowdsourcing tool, web, social media, and mobile apps to collect fresh
ideas and stimulate discussions. Residents go to www.imesa.mesaaz.gov to
submit, vote, and comment on ideas to
transform the community. This allows
residents to take an active role in the future of the city and serves as a gauge of
the priorities of Mesa residents.
Recognizing that face-to-face interaction is still an important part of citizen engagement, public meetings are
held to gather additional feedback from
members of the public who are not as
active online.
Some ideas are simple and can be
implemented right away, while others take time, funding, and planning
to accomplish. One idea was to ﬁnd a
new home for HeatSync Labs, which
had grown out of its space in another
community, and the City of Mesa took
notice. The city found available properties, and a few months later, HeatSync
Labs opened on Main Street in the heart
of downtown Mesa.
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Parks & Recreation

Now, the most popular idea on iMesa
is to save the historic Buckhorn Baths.
The Buckhorn Baths is a hotel and mineral bath spa used by spring training
athletes and movie stars in the 1950s
and '60s. The hotel closed in 1999 and
is number one on the Society for Commercial Archeology's top 10 list of endangered roadside places.
The collected ideas are referred to the
iMesa Resident Steering Committee,
which recommends ideas that have the
potential to be transformative, meaningful, and extraordinary to the Mesa
City Council.
After collecting project ideas and
gathering input from the community for more than a year, the Mesa City
Council agreed to forward a $70 million bond package of projects to voters,
which passed on November 6, 2012.
The projects include a variety of new
and renovated recreational assets, such
as youth and adult sports ﬁelds, open
turf areas, playgrounds, trails, museum resources, and an aquatics facility.
Each project in the bond package
had been through the iMesa process, beginning as an idea from the

| DECEMBER 2012 | WWW.NRPA.ORG

community and working
its way through the iMesa Resident Steering Committee,
City of Mesa staff for feasibility, advisory boards for recommendations,
and many public meetings to collect
feedback from residents.
Remember the Buckhorn Baths?
Well, included in the bond package
is a project to begin working with the
landowners and community preservation leaders to identify opportunities to reuse the Buckhorn Baths site.
Throughout the process, iMesa has
become a brand for Mesa's future.
From an iMesa ﬂashmob and public
service announcements to booths at
community events and business cards,
the iMesa message to imagine, invest,
and improve has become our mantra
and part of our culture.
We challenged our residents to
imagine a better community, invest
in that community, and improve our
community. We hope to build on this
success by utilizing the iMesa process
to develop more ideas for great projects in the future.
Marc Heirshberg, CPRP, is Director of
Mesa, Arizona's Parks, Recreation, and
Commercial Facilities (marc.heirshberg@
mesaaz.gov).
December 2012 - Parks & Recreation

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