Wednesday, July 31st, the Mini Planning Grant Award Winners were announced for a total of $100,000 from Hamilton County's Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) . Hamilton County Planning + Development (HCP+D) solicited projects from jurisdictions which participate in the County's HUD grant programs.

Congratulations to the City of Cheviot, City of Madeira, City of Sharonville, and the Village of Silverton on being the four jurisdictions to receive these funds. Also, congratulations to the Village of Lockland. Though Lockland did not receive direct funding, they were chosen to receive in-kind services and support for their planning related project. Find more information about the projects these jurisdictions will take on as well as the projects of past winners in the press release here.

We are improving the County's jurisdictions' page of our website! Within the Division of Community Planning, our Summer Intern has help build and generate new content, including jurisdiction-specific, open data sites, using MySidewalk, an analytics and data reporting platform, constructed for use by the public sector. Using federal data sources at the census block level, each Hamilton County jurisdiction's page will be linked to its own mobile-friendly and visually-appealing MySidewalk page, allowing users access to information related to population, families, housing, economy, poverty and transportation. 

Nicolette Wallis, a contributor to the MySidewalk Knowledge Center, notes a common issue for local governments is a wish to make data about their geographic areas available and accessible to local leaders and stakeholders. "Finding useful datasets and leveraging them to make decisions or impact public knowledge has been challenging," said Wallis. The additional benefits of this new resource to Hamilton County are the display options of data visualization and the automatic update function for the new data sets that will be published in the 2020 US Census. In real time, each page contains a customized, comprehensive report, including county and state cross-data comparisons, maps, charts, trend lines and tables.

Find the profiles here.

The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County is hosting a  Community Listening Session at the Downtown Main Library at 800 Vine Street on Tuesday, August 13th from   7:00 pm-8:30 pm. They are gathering input on how the Public Library can 

re-envision its north and south buildings downtown to become a 21st century destination library. 

The first 30 minutes will be an open house with various brainstorming activities, and the remainder of the evening will be a presentation given by David Schnee, lead consultant on the Facility Master Plan. 

There will be light refreshments and this meeting is open to all whether you can stay the entire time or just have a few minutes to share your thoughts.  Building the Next Generation Library   and the Facility Master Plan are available for viewing. If you would like to provide input and cannot attend you can find the  the survey here .