Comprehensive Planning

What Is a Comprehensive Plan?

• A comprehensive plan is a long-range plan for a city, which captures the
vision of where the community wants to be at some point in the future. The
term comprehensive suggests it is an all-inclusive approach to analyzing and
evaluating the future growth of a community. At minimum, most
comprehensive plans provide guidance for the physical development of a
community, with an emphasis on future land use and thoroughfare
planning.
• Many comprehensive plans also include guidance on elements such as
community growth and annexation; infrastructure capacity; housing and
neighborhoods; public facilities; parks, open space, recreation and trails;
economic development; urban form and design; and, increasingly,
sustainability and resilience. Source:- Halff Associates, Inc.
The contents of a comprehensive plan can vary from
community to community, but in most cases, a plan should
consist of the following elements:
• land use (both existing and future),
• demographics (existing and projected),
• housing,
• infrastructure,
• education,
• recreation, and.
• thoroughfares.

Source:- web.extension.illinois.edu ›
Common Integrated Tools
• Comprehensive plans can be embodied within a single document or organized
by an umbrella document cross-referencing a more specific sub-plan. However,
there are several critical components that should be directly integrated into the
main document.
• These include in the community are:-
• Vision. The community vision needs to be derived from a robust public
engagement process. The results of this process are embodied in the vision
statement, guiding principles, goals, objectives, and in many cases, element-
based policy statements.

Source:- Halff Associates, Inc.

 • Future Land Use Plan. The future land use plan, which includes the future land use
map and its associated classification descriptions, provides essential guidance for
decision-making, e.g., during rezoning decisions and updates to development
regulations, regarding the future growth and character of the community. It provides
property owners and the overall community predictability in the future built
environment. It needs to identify a future build-out scenario supported by the
community vision, yet still based in market reality.
LUCKNOW, U.P MASTER PLAN-2021

Source:- Halff Associates, Inc. Source:- Google image search.

• Thoroughfare Plan. The thoroughfare plan provides essential guidance regarding
jurisdiction-wide connectivity. Its focus should be on arterial and collector street
connections that provide through-connectivity, ensuring that as a community grows over
time, residents and visitors can traverse the community in a logical and efficient manner.
While many communities have independent, more refined thoroughfare master plans, the
thoroughfare plan map should be generated in concert with the future land use plan and
be embodied within the comprehensive plan. This ensures they are developed cohesively
and create one overarching framework for community form and connectivity.

Source:- Halff Associates, Inc.

Action-Oriented Implementation Tools
• In some comprehensive plans, the vision and the future land use and
thoroughfare plans may be the only guidance for how a jurisdiction should move
forward. While essential components, a truly implementable comprehensive
plan should provide an implementation action plan that can be accomplished
incrementally in defined timeframes during the plan horizon. These
implementation actions are what sets apart a plan used by only a few and a plan
used by everyone.
• Regulatory Updates. Predictable change of the built environment cannot be
accomplished by a future land use map alone. Most of the physical change of the
built environment comes from private-sector investment in new development
and redevelopment. An implementable comprehensive plan should provide
guidance as to how the community vision for the future can and should be
translated into subsequent regulatory amendments to the jurisdiction’s zoning,
subdivision and other development-related regulations.
Source:- Halff Associates, Inc.
• Capital Improvements. While much of the built environment is created by
the private sector, it is built upon the backbone created by the public sector
through infrastructure investment and long-term maintenance such as
streets, water, wastewater and drainage. Implementable comprehensive
plans should identify where new or redeveloped public infrastructure.
• Non-Capital Improvements/Operational Changes. Similarly, a jurisdiction
provides a series of services that provide essential community functions
such as police, fire, EMS, parks and libraries. It is imperative that a
comprehensive plan provides guidance as to how the community vision
translates into new or modified community services. It should provide
guidance as to how non-capital improvements/operational changes can be
integrated into a jurisdiction’s annual budgeting process.

Source:- Halff Associates, Inc.

• Future Studies. It is often said that a comprehensive plan should view a
jurisdiction at a 30,000-foot level. This means it inherently needs to remain
at a high level and should not “dive into the details.” Consequently, it
should provide guidance as to whether future studies may be needed to
better achieve implementation. This could include providing strategic
directions as to what needs to be considered during the next update of an
existing, more refined sub-plan, e.g., a parks master plan, or the request for
an entirely new plan such as a corridor plan, neighborhood reinvestment or
other sub-area plan.
• Policies. In some cases, a community chooses to declare its philosophy or
strategic directions through an actual policy document, for example, a
Complete Streets policy. In other cases, implementation of an action may
first require an informal determination to move forward, such as promoting
or incentivizing infill development in areas served by public infrastructure.
In this regard, these “strategic directions” may serve as policy directions
and will eventually lead to other implementation actions.
Source:- Halff Associates, Inc.
Important Procedures
• Beyond the integrated and action-oriented implementation tools, a truly
implementable comprehensive plan needs to remain current and front and
center. There should be established procedures for integrating the plan into
decision-making, keeping it updated and providing accountability for
implementing it over time.
• Mechanism for Decision-Making. In some jurisdictions, the vision, guiding
principles, goals, objectives and element-based policies are used as part of
decision-making during rezonings and development-related processes. In
other jurisdictions, conformance with the comprehensive plan is required
for all items placed on the agenda of an elected and appointed board or
commission.
Source:- Halff Associates, Inc.
• Annual Progress Report and Updates. A comprehensive plan, or any plan for that
matter, only truly reflects a snapshot in time. While it is intended to provide short- and
long-term guidance for the future, it will not get everything right, nor will it be
perfectly implemented. It is intended to provide guidance moving forward, and it is
not set in stone. It can only be effective if it is up to date and relevant with current
community realities. It is important that the comprehensive plan is made available to
the public, such as on the jurisdiction’s website, and kept up to date as
implementation actions are completed over time, i.e., checking off completed actions
and reprioritizing remaining actions, reporting back to elected and/or appointed
officials regarding progress, and periodically updating the plan through annual
updates, five-year evaluation and 10-year update.
• Implementation Accountability. When it is all said and done, there is no substitute for
accountability. It is essential that procedures are put in place to identify who is
responsible for managing the implementation program. In many jurisdictions,
positions such as the city manager (or assistant city manager) or planning director are
designated as the implementation manager.
Source:- Halff Associates, Inc.
Public Participation
What is public participation?
• Public participation can be any process that directly engages the public in
decision-making and gives full consideration to public input in making that
decision.
• Public participation is a process, not a single event. It consists of a series of
activities and actions by a sponsor agency over the full lifespan of a project to both
inform the public and obtain input from them. Public participation affords
stakeholders (those that have an interest or stake in an issue, such as individuals,
interest groups, communities) the opportunity to influence decisions that affect
their lives.

Source:- www.epa.gov/international-cooperation/public-participation-
guide-introduction-public-participation
Public Participation Guide: Tools
• There are a number of tools or techniques that you can use to implement your public
participation process. These include in-person tools (those that involve face-to-face
interaction – meetings or workshops, for example) and remote tools (those that do
not involve face-to-face interaction – written surveys or websites, for example).
This tools section is organized around the fundamental purpose of the tool:
• Tools to Inform the Public -- techniques that you can use to provide members of the
public with the information they need to understand the project and decision
process
• Tools to Generate and Obtain Input -- techniques that you can use to obtain public
input to the decision process
• Tools for Consensus Building and Agreement-Seeking – techniques that you can use
to bring diverse groups of stakeholders together to engage in shared learning and
decision making.
Source:- www.epa.gov/international-cooperation/public-participation-
guide-introduction-public-participation