Ponderay Vision-2-Action

Ponderay, ID | 2020

Ponderay, “The Little City With a Big Future”, is located in Idaho’s panhandle on the shore of Lake Pend Oreille. Compared to other nearby cities, Ponderay lacks access to key regional amenities such as safe access to Lake Pend Oreille and the Pend Oreille Bay Trail. One key obstacle to realizing the benefit of full, safe lakefront access is due to the waterfront’s historical use as an iron smelter. Although the Historic Smelter Area was only active for a short period of time in the early 1900s, past activities have left the soil in this area with high levels of lead and other metals.

Cascadia Partners was retained by the Center for Creative Land Recycling (CCLR) to provide real estate development and public engagement services toward this effort, with the goal to develop a series of aspirational land use scenarios for the brownfield site to help inform the scale and type of mitigation proposed in the site’s mitigation plan as mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

With the guidance of CCLR staff, Cascadia Partners developed outreach materials and a web-based digital open house, using Maptionnaire, a map-based community engagement platform, to gather input from the community about their vision for the site and its surroundings.

In addition to collecting broad community input, Cascadia Partners conducted six key stakeholder interviews to gain local insights and to better understand nuances of this tight-knit community. Through a series of Zoom-based, virtual charrettes with the local brownfields team, Cascadia also developed a series of alternative development scenarios for the Ponderay Village that considered various uses for the site. The results of this process are currently being used to develop an areawide reuse plan for Ponderay Village which will inform new zoning and capital improvements for the area.