The short answer is, "really well." By that I mean we are making progress daily. The long answer is that, at least for now, it takes longer than you might think. So while we are making progress at a good pace, we aren't exactly days away from starting our first project. Maybe a week or two if we are lucky. The reason has to do with how quickly the event came together and some of the bigger problems we had to work through to make SMB happen. While we definitely wanted to bring the Park into the process early on, it just wasn't possible. We are in the process of doing that now and things are going well. We decided that rather than just try to get some projects done quickly, we would use the opportunity we have right now to define a formal process to get projects reviewed by the Park and then hopefully approved. This will serve both SMB and the Park better in the long run. Assuming the process we put in place works well, then projects will be approved much faster than if we did things in a less formal way.
Btw, one issue came up that we didn't anticipate. We missed it mainly because things were moving so fast in the days prior to May 11th. As I went through 200+ RSVPs looking for items to place on the ballot, I was a little surprised by how easy that was. There was just so much agreement as to what the projects might be. So I might have 10 people suggesting the same thing 10 different ways and it was very easy to distill that down to one ballot item that covered all the suggestions. What I didn't notice was that some of the items were pretty vague. For example, "trail maintenance" received a lot of votes and was very high on the list. But what does that mean? I can go out and find lots of way to improve the trails, but am I addressing the issues that caused the vote to be so high on that item? We are coming up with a way to address that issue. The good news is that by the time we have a better definition of what people meant when they voted for "trail maintenance," we should have lots of experience proposing projects to the park and getting them approved.
Other projects are much easier to define and we even have good definitions already for some that are not. While it may not be clear because we didn't get an official dog vote, the hands down winner this year was clearly "more dog bag dispensers." It wasn't even close. We pretty much knew this would happen and so we were paying attention early. As a result, we know exactly what people want on that even though it sounds kind of vague. We are ready to move forward on that if the Park agrees.
