NAUVOO, Ill. — A new city planning program is helping Nauvoo residents look past religious, cultural and historical differences to brighten the future of this city rich in Church history.
The city planning organization, known as the MAPPING Program, is supported by the Institute of Rural Affairs at Western Illinois University. The state-wide program was created in 1991 to help rural communities sustain an economic future.
Nauvoo residents, with the assistance of program representatives, met in October 2009 to discuss Nauvoo’s most pressing issues.
Nauvoo Mayor John McCarty said the Nauvoo MAPPING program addresses long-running cultural disconnects and recent economic uncertainty in an effort to secure a future for this town on the Mississippi River.
“It is a small town, but it has a lot of history,” McCarty said. “It’s the future that’s the problem.”
Nauvoo, a town of 1,000 permanent residents, currently struggles with declining tourism and inflated property taxes.
Locals said the announcement of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ temple in 1999 brought investors to Nauvoo, but the anticipated rise in tourism, population and business has not fully materialized.
An influx of investment caused a rise in property values and the property taxes assessed as a percentage of those values, residents said. Some properties now sit vacant as incomes have failed to match rising taxes and other expenses.
The town has also suffered from religious and cultural divides stemming from Nauvoo’s history.
The town grew rapidly in the 1840s as the headquarters of The Church of Jesus Christ, but Nauvoo’s fortunes since most Latter-day Saints went West have been uneven.
A combination of delicate economic and cultural factors has caused previous city planning attempts to end in repeated stalemate, McCarty said.
“There have been disagreeing groups in the past, but right now it’s not so much people not wanting to communicate as it is there never being anything in place for people if they wanted to discuss something,” McCarty said. “But hopefully that’ll change now.”
After weeks of town meetings, volunteer committees formed to address each of the five goals established by Nauvoo residents.
The five areas of focus include: eco-tourism, heritage-tourism, quality of life, community relations and entrepreneurism.
The public dialogue among committees has created a forum for different groups to exchange thoughts on the future of Nauvoo — a benefit of the MAPPING program that has been praised by local residents.
“With the new program, we can have communication,” said Terry Marler, co-chairman of the MAPPING entrepreneurship committee and BYU alumnus. “There is a lot more talk now between people and groups. With MAPPING, everyone brings ideas on how to help Nauvoo; it’s not ‘how to help the Mormons’ or ‘how to help the Icarians’ or ‘how to help the German descendants.’ The program has this focus of how to really help Nauvoo as a place.”
The committees are composed of citizens from different backgrounds to ensure balance in decision making.
Elder Dean Hughes and Sister Kathleen Hughes, from Midway, serve as public affairs missionaries for the church in Nauvoo. They have represented the church in the Nauvoo MAPPING program since its inception. Elder Hughes, a former BYU English professor, helped draft grants for a Nauvoo bird trail and a city sidewalk project.
“As a church, we want to do things that will help us to be a good neighbor,” Elder Hughes said. “So if we can use our sites to attract people here for a longer season, then that will be good to the city, and we want to be good to the city.”
In May, the MAPPING program published the Nauvoo Action Plan, containing strategies to address Nauvoo’s challenges.
David Miller, a member of the heritage-tourism committee and the executive board of the Nauvoo Chamber of Commerce, said the transition to new projects is difficult, but progress has been made. A single long-term marketing plan has been devised to highlight Nauvoo’s unique brand of historical tourism.
“Tourism is a huge asset for Nauvoo that we have not been utilizing well enough, so we have been inviting other groups that want to work together and focus on something other than just family summer tours,” Miller said.
The projects of the various committees operate on different deadlines according to need and funding, but some have already created successful results.
Shortly after the MAPPING meetings began, the entrepreneurial committee founded Nauvoo’s Commerce Club in late October 2009.
“The Commerce Club is where we can come together as a community and share ideas and give each other assistance and emotional support,” said Brock Stout, a BYU business graduate and committee member.
Instruction by the Commerce Club helped Sylvia Piggott, a new resident from Belfast, Northern Ireland, consider the possibility of opening a year-round restaurant in Nauvoo — a difficult task considering the tourism drop-off in winter.
In April, Piggott and her husband, Jerry, opened McKee’s, a small restaurant already famous for its nitrogen-frozen ice cream. Piggott credits the creation of her business to the inspiration she felt while attending MAPPING meetings.
“The program gave me an insight as to what could be done, because they had this great vision that Nauvoo wasn’t going to be a place that would close up in the winter,” Piggott said. “It was a message that said, ‘If you have it open, then the people would come.’ I just liked how they had this whole idea that Nauvoo would be a year-round community.”
The MAPPING program emphasizes residents should make their own strategies and choices when planning for the future. Piggott explained the freedom and eventual success she experienced through the MAPPING program helped her feel of service to the community.
“Wherever you are in the world, you want people to love their city,” she said. “You want people to have a good experience with full tummies.”
