On Saturday morning, Saratoga Associates, hired by the City of Auburn to put together a Comprehensive Master Plan, held an interactive planning session for the public to participate in to develop a plan to envision what the city of Auburn should look like years from now and what the funding priorities should be for the city to get there.

The good news is that it was a terrific session. The bad news is that less than three dozen Auburnians took part.

Perhaps it was the heavy rain that morning, but turnout for such an important issue was disappointing. City Manager Mark Palesh made it clear that the people who came were not the normal naysayers, the contributors to the “Two Cents” column or other anonymous forums - those who showed up know that Auburn needs to move forward and are willing to put their ideas forth in an open forum. They did so in a civil and positive manner.

Utilizing the Cayuga Community College auditorium, the participants were able to identify, through 50 slides, what they liked and didn't like in the blink of an eye. In three breakout groups they were able to give specific positives and negatives. The regular negatives came to the fore: large plastic commercial signs, big box stores (i.e. Wal-Mart type designs) and slum and/or absentee landlords.

More importantly the group made it clear that work needed to be done on such things as the northern gateway and accentuating tourism opportunities. They also made it clear that any plan that is done needs to have a time line for implementation with costs considered.

The last time the city did a Comprehensive Master Plan was 1991. The city's director of planning and economic development, Jenny Haines (who has pushed doing a plan since being appointed to the post last year), believes that Auburn should do one every 10 years. She also believes it is vital that timelines with benchmarks be part of the end product that will be presented to the city council next fall (for the record, I work for a funder of part of this project).

For such a plan to be workable, it needs widespread input. While some groups had representatives present on Saturday (three of six city representatives on the county Legislature and several tourism representatives took part) other significant stakeholders did not (including any member of the city council, most human services organizations and education representatives). More importantly, while the usual (thankfully) community activists were present - a broader swath of Auburn's citizenry needed to be present and were not. There is one more chance to have a say at this point: from 6:30 to 8:30 tonight at the Auburn Public Theater, 108 Genesee St.

Cosentino is a former mayor of Auburn and can be contacted at cozguytho@aol.com