Easy steps can be taken to provide more vision and effectiveness for a
municipal road map to the future.
Bill Spikowski, Better!
Cities and Towns
Most cities and towns have a comprehensive plan, an earnest
document intended to guide elected and appointed officials as they make
decisions about the future. Some comprehensive plans are quickly forgotten;
others are followed literally when land is being rezoned and infrastructure
expansion are being considered.
How can you tell if a
comprehensive plan has become stale, meaningless, or even harmful? Watch for
these tell-tale signs:
- When the vision described in the plan sounds like it was
written thirty years ago – or the plan is vision-free.
- When
the comprehensive plan has to be retrofitted to allow walkable neighborhoods or
“complete streets.”
- When rezoning applications routinely require amendments to
the comprehensive plan.
- When
the city engineer insists he must widen a road to meet the plan’s
level-of-service standards, despite adopted complete-streets policies.
- When the future land-use map in the plan looks like a
zoning map, breaking the community into single-use monocultures.
- When the plan is no longer being implemented.
It doesn’t have to stay that way! A tool with such authority
and potential is a great opportunity for a community to identify and respond to
current challenges and opportunities.
Comprehensive plans are so-named because they address the
local government’s entire area and cover a variety of topics including
transportation, utilities, housing, and the environment. These plans, known as
general plans in many states, usually contain a future land-use map and related
goals and policies that can be a strong positive force in redirecting ingrained
habits about how a community should grow (or not grow, as circumstances
dictate).
Communities across the country take advantage of the
comprehensive planning process to set a new course for their future. The best
comprehensive plans define and protect natural features and farmland, are
explicit about the nature of the future street network, and have future
land-use maps that establish the desired character of existing and future urban
areas.
The examples highlighted here just graze the surface of what
has been happening recently in comprehensive planning.
- Somerville, MA
- Nashville, TN
- Raleigh, NC
- El Paso, TX
Implementation
Effective comprehensive plans identify the specific steps to
be taken after the plan is adopted to implement the plan. These can include
better methods of selecting capital improvements, new annexation policies, and
zoning-code overhauls.
Without thorough implementation, a comprehensive plan’s true
potential has been wasted.
