About 

Pitkin County is currently conducting a Health Impact Assessment that includes site planning services for the Phillips Mobile Home Park. Key to this planning effort is the collaboration between the County, design team and the community on a variety of levels to determine how best to approach the approximately 65.6 acres that the County has purchased. The County wants to examine its choices in the context of the HIA process in order to go beyond traditional land use planning and embrace supporting various dimensions of healthy communities.

The HIA and Site Planning Services will be conducted in the following four phases:

Phase One: Screening

Screening predicts how an HIA will be useful for the decision-making process. Through screening, the design team will begin to identify whether proposed development scenarios could result in potentially significant health effects, and whether there are health disparities or vulnerabilities present in the Phillips community.

Phase Two: Scoping

The Scoping phase will generate a research plan, including research questions and methods for acquiring new data. The design team will be setting boundaries and identifying criteria that will be used to evaluate alternatives in the next phases of the project.

Phase Three: Assessment

The Assessment phase generates profiles of existing health, social, environmental, and housing conditions, and predictions for how each alternative development scenario may affect these conditions and in turn affect health. The Assessment phase will also involve interviews with residents, the previous owners, County staff, and potential partners in the property and its uses in order to collect information related to the issues identified in the screening phase.

Phase Four: Recommendations/Report

Based on the predictions generated by the assessment, the design team will develop recommendations to mitigate any negative health impacts and maximize positive ones for each land use scenario. Recommendations will be responsive to the predicted health impacts, practical, evidence- or experience-based, technically, politically, and economically feasible, and enforceable when necessary.

What is a Health Impact Assessment?

“A Health Impact Assessment is a combination of procedures, methods, and tools by which a policy, a program or a project may be judged as to its potential effects on the health of a population and the distribution of effects within the population.”   ~Gotenburg Consensus Paper, 1999