The Need for a Comprehensive Plan

Urban planning is centralized on one major tenant – preparing for and helping communities avoid problems. And just like you, city planners must think ahead to the future and calculate what types of problems may occur if different decisions are made. One of the most common ways of doing this is adopting what is called a comprehensive plan.

Comprehensive plans are an important component to running a city and keeping it moving forward. The comprehensive plan serves as the community’s guide to moving the community into the future. Imagine if you built a house without blueprints. We know we need a foundation, but don’t know what type of material to use because we don’t know if the house will have one, two, or three stories. Do we put in a basement, crawlspace, slab, or build the house on stilts? Without that good foundation the rest of the house may be a waste.

The comprehensive plan provides us with the blueprints of how to build the city over the next 10-20 years. Sure, circumstances may change, funding may decrease, or a new major employer may come into the community causing a change in the plan, but this would be no different than asking a contractor to move a wall a few feet or add an additional closet to your blueprint. Tweaks can easily be made along the way. Even with the changes made, in the end you still have a well-laid out and constructed house that thought was put into and wasn’t simply pieced together.

Comprehensive planning also impacts many elements of our community. This type of planning incorporates areas such as historic preservation planning, economic development planning, tourism planning, and land use planning. This encourages an interdisciplinary approach to ensure that all of the different elements of a community are completing one another. Maybe economic development planning has identified we need more business land. The land use planning can then address where new business land can be identified and ultimately rezoning property to create more business land in the community.

Ultimately, a comprehensive plan gets the community to a place they desire to be. The key component in all of this is you, our citizens. Part of our job as appointed officials is to provide you with a community and city services that you desire to have. As we start looking at developing the first components of a comprehensive plan this summer, I encourage you to participate at every opportunity you can. Your input is vital to ensure the house we build is the house this community desires.