Planning department sponsored by Walt Disney

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If you frequent the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Department, you probably have noticed a neon sign in a conference room just off the lobby of the Eighth Floor offices.

But do you know the history of the Innovation Station?

With a name that sounds as if it could have been inspired by Walt Disney himself, the space is intended to encourage creativity.

It used to be located on the opposite side of the building from where the planning department is now located in the current site of the CATS offices.

According to Charlotte Mecklenburg planning director Debra Campbell, the former planning director, Martin Crampton, set aside the space as a way to avoid simply developing regulations for the bureaucratic process. Instead it was a place to be, well, innovative.

“It was a place for us to think about how we innovate, how we create systemic and sustainable change in our community,” Campbell said. “We used to have examples of all the projects that we’ve worked on so the public could come up to the floor and just peruse around and see the things we are doing.”

But displaying examples of innovative projects is something the department hasn’t done much of lately.

“I hadn’t thought about that in a long time,” Campbell said. “That was a really good idea to have the projects we worked on displayed. We don’t celebrate enough. It’s always on to the next thing. We are busy.”