The Town of Purcellville’s first visioning meeting on Jan. 12 left some residents baffled at the lack of public input for the future plans for the town.

What seemed like a team-building exercise for Purcellville Town Council, the Planning Commission and the Board of Architectural Review turned out to be more than four hours of discussing each other and finding a way to better work together.

“Our mission tonight is one, open it up for dialogue. Two, to capture some of those great ideas,” Greg Wagner, Purcellville Town Council member said. “One of the things I know all the groups want to do is to have a better chance at dialogue. I think we’ll have a great opportunity throughout to hear a lot of different viewpoint, a lot of different voices.”

The introduced method is called appreciative inquiry, which is an approach to a positive transformation of an organization’s effectiveness, according to town documents. The key points to the plan is to create a positive, strength-based approach to change; have a method of finding the best in people, teams and organizations; finding a way of co-creating inspiring plans of action; finding an approach to focusing on what the town wants more of; and making a strategy of finding and unleashing the positive elements that enable success.

Town staff also presented the 5-I Cycle where the town will initiate, inquire, imagine, innovate and implement. According to town documents, the initiate stage is where leadership commits to using the approach to propel the organization forward. The next step, inquire, would be an extensive, cooperative search to understand the best of what is and what has been.

The next stage, imagine, is an energizing exploration of what might be, according to documents. Next, the town would innovate or determine what should be, then implement it or create what will be.

“I thought it was a great meeting. It was an opportunity for the separate bodies to get together to talk about commonality of mission and purpose and how we work together,” Purcellville Mayor Bob Lazaro said. “I thought it was helpful in terms getting together to talk about these types of things. From my perspective any time when folks can get together like that and talk about things is a positive.”

“We have some more work to do, at the end of the day we all agree that Purcellville is a great place to live and raise a family and that there’s a lot of strengths starting with the folks that live there and the business community,” he continued. “We need to sit down a little bit more to go through these things. But I think at the end of the day we will come up with a good vision statement.”

Although a seemingly good workshop for town employees, about five residents showed up thinking there would be a public input session for them to voice their opinion. Kelli Grim, a resident of Purcellville, said she was not pleased at how the meeting was advertised and wouldn’t have known about it if she hadn’t attended a previous council meeting.

“I was glad to see that they were trying to seemingly do something to bring about working better together, but I’m concerned that I don’t see any public comment,” Grim said. “There’s no public questions, no input and there’s no public citizens, just regular citizens that attend the meetings regularly that are interested in being a part of things. There’s no one talking to them about this visioning.”

But, according to Lazaro, there will be a time for public input when the town puts together their comprehensive plan in May or June. He said it would be a good opportunity for residents to give comment on the plan. He also said that the meeting had been advertised as a work session for the town.

Mary Beth Barbagallo, who lives in Purcellville and owns a business in downtown, thought this would be a great opportunity to speak to the BAR about problems or concerns local businesses have.

“I had thought it was a public input session and I had some ideas for the Architectural Review Board for them, an opportunity to help out some of the businesses in town,” Barbagallo said. “But, it’s not a public input session. I think it’s just they had set up the criteria before we came here I thought there was going to be public input but I guess not.”

Former Purcellville Town Council member Susie Windham was hopeful that the workshop would help the town become more aware of what needed to be done in the coming years.

“I found out there would be a visioning meeting and that is a captivating name for a meeting. I thought it was going to be about goals for the town, essentially, I didn’t have the idea that it was going to be a team building,” Windham said. “I believe with this information they will be better volunteers and improve themselves and work better on behalf of the citizens.”

Lazaro said there will likely be another meeting of the three bodies on town issues, but that he said the first attempt was very positive.