Letter from Councilman Robinson to Jamie Greene & City Manager Stewart

Below, a series of emails between Councilman Robinson and Jamie Greene of Planning Next. City Manager Stewart is cc’d. It starts with the most recent (Nov. 10, 2025).

Further down in the thread: a June 10, 2025 email from Councilman Robinson to Mr. Greene. Robinson got a scathing rebuke from several other council members for communicating with Mr. Greene. We think he was doing his job as a public servant.

From: Robinson, David
Date: Mon, Nov 10, 2025 at 11:50 AM
Subject: Re: [EXTERNAL] FW: Comp Plan Process Update
To: Jamie Greene
Cc: Stewart, Robyn

I’m writing to you regarding this week’s Comprehensive Plan community meeting.

As I expressed in my June email to you, the Comprehensive Plan process you are facilitating for Worthington is of great importance to the well-being of our community, in terms of both sanctioned land use and, in some ways even more importantly, the health of our community’s social fabric.

As I shared in early summer, I deeply hope that we can avoid a repeat, through your current efforts, of the fundamentally flawed process that led to the 2013-14 UMCH Focus Area update.  That process was presented to the public, and participation solicited, as if their input substantively mattered, and yet, in reality, both the process and the resulting Plan were consultant-driven and pre-determined (at the behest of the City Manager).  In short, the community was misled in a significant way. It was a serious breach of the public trust.

As a result, the updated (2014) UMCH Plan became the origin point of a decade of needless and unproductive conflict in our city.  The published Plan falsely claimed the public’s support (a “consensus”), when in fact the reality was the opposite. I can provide many hundreds of public comments, from 2013 to the present, supporting this assertion, with very few taking the opposite view.  The disconnect became increasingly evident.  You had to live here to truly appreciate the cost to our community—acrimony, misinformation, resentment, deception, anger, endless meetings, twisted words, loss of trust, loss of friends, money spent, and, as a daily reminder, a beautiful piece of land in the heart of our city begging the question why we do not come and enjoy its natural bounty.  It has been painful.

Unfortunately, from all that I have seen and heard, both directly and through others, your current efforts in Worthington are at risk of repeating the same fundamental mistake made twelve years ago.  The community has been led to believe, through your words and statements by the City, that the Plan being developed will be rooted in, and expressive of, our stated views, values, and interests.  I think you said something like, “It’s your plan, not mine,” at the WEC Launch meeting. But the reality, thus far?  You are making far-reaching decisions, establishing Ten Principles, telling us what our choices are (and what they are not), based on… what?  The comments gathered at the WEC (and online counterpart)?  The committee meetings you are managing?  No. The public’s voice has not been adequately heard.  If it had, the maps your firm created and brought to the last Committee meeting would have shown a broader range of concepts.

And though late, it is not too late.

Here’s my suggestion:

At this week’s meeting, proactively seek to listen and learn, without preemptive restrictions, what the public truly thinks and wants regarding the UMCH property.  And to do so by using a big palette, containing a wide and diverse range of ideas, so that we can be creative and sensitive to the particular possibilities in Worthington.  In this way, we may avoid formulaic, mediocre outcomes, out of sync with our distinctive, historic community.

You have spoken with both WARD and PCPW, and are thus aware of the basic concept they have been promoting for a decade—mixed use with a large, contiguous public greenspace as centerpiece—a serious and aspirational vision that has been embraced and supported by large segments of the public. By including this basic concept among the possibilities for consideration and discussion at this week’s meeting, you would simply be doing what one would expect from someone who really wants to know what the public thinks. Conversely, by prematurely excluding this important vision from the upcoming public discussion, you would be steering the process toward a constricted, pre-ordained end, based on something other than the community’s input.  I believe this will be easy for the public to discern.

I hope you choose the former route, but if not, please at least be forthright and honest with the Worthington public.  If this is not a community-based process, tell us.  Stop the charade.  Save us the time and money—and the indignity.  We have endured gaslighting before.  If perpetuated it will only intensify public resentment, as well as resolve.

Please do right by Worthington.

David

David Robinson
City Council Member
Worthington, Ohio

I’m writing to you about the upcoming public meeting in our community, “The Launch of Worthington Together,” where I believe you will be serving as the chief facilitator for the consulting firm, Planning NEXT.

The Comprehensive Plan rewrite for which your firm has been hired is of great importance to the future of our community.  I wish to avoid in your current efforts what happened, to the serious and continuing detriment of our community, the last time our City hired a consulting firm to rewrite a portion of our Comprehensive Plan.

Back in 2013-14, our City Manager at the time, Matt Greeson, hired consulting firm MKSK to rewrite the UMCH portion of the Comprehensive Plan.  As a central part of that process, the public was invited to community forums so they could directly contribute. The typical Worthington resident who participated naturally assumed that their expressed views and ideas, and those of their neighbors, would actually matter in determining the substance of the final Plan.

Unfortunately, this assumption was not borne out.  Following two well-attended, interactive public meetings, and significant online feedback, the City adopted a Plan that was extremely out of sync and in conflict with what the public had expressed throughout the process. This is not just my opinion. If interested, you can review one source of public responses to the proposed Plan, here: https://worthington.org/565/Interactive-Feedback. The comments are available at the links on that page.

Further, the resulting Comprehensive Plan claimed, in its own text, to be a “consensus document.”  This claim, absurd to anyone tuned in to Worthington public opinion, was an affront.  To me, it was morally offensive that our city would promote a falsehood in a formal and significant public document. Compounding this original transgression, the City used this claim of “consensus” in a way that sowed conflict for years.

When I became a Council Member in 2018, I began asking City Manager Greeson how and why the City could claim this “consensus” regarding the UMCH Plan when it was clearly not true.  On more than one occasion, he equivocated and deflected.  Eventually, however, at maybe the third one-on-one meeting where I pressed him on the matter, he said, and I paraphrase: “what we were doing was not really gathering ideas, but putting together focus groups so we could see how they responded to expert opinion.”

While I was glad that the truth of things was finally acknowledged—that the Plan was not based on public opinion and was never intended to be so—I was also dismayed and angry. The Worthington residents who came to those community planning meetings did not do so in order to be studied as part of a marketing exercise. They came to be heard and taken seriously as contributing citizens. The City’s actions amounted to a violation of the public trust. Then, by subsequently telling the public there was a “consensus,” that we supported a plan that we did not, the City engaged in a gaslighting of our community.

The consequences of all of this for our community have been far-reaching and highly negative. The UMCH property remains undeveloped. The City has had to defend itself against a hostile lawsuit filed by the current owner of the property. And, perhaps worst of all, the community has suffered as the possibility of productive and respectful public discourse about this issue has become nearly impossible.

I am not privy to the discussions that you and City Manager Stewart have had, nor do I know how you interpret your charge as our consultant, specifically as it relates to the purpose of public participation. But I do hope to avoid a repeat of what I have described above, hence this email. The public has a right to expect that the Plan resulting from your work will be based primarily upon their ideas, input, and expressed desires, and not that of any other party. There is an obligation for all involved in leading this process to be forthright with the public about the purpose and significance of their participation. It is their Comprehensive Plan just as it is their community.

So I move forward, trusting in your goodwill and professionalism, with anticipation of further dialog as the planning process unfolds.

Thank you.