Special Feature

Why Local Governments Need Comprehensive Plans

by Jerry Weitz, FAICP

Citizens and policy officials in local government need to better recognize the importance of comprehensive plans. There may be barriers to understanding the essential role of a local comprehensive plan unless rationales for comprehensive plans are given explicitly in understandable language. To that end, I have penned some rationales for planning that I hope will increase understanding of the purposes of preparing and adopting a local comprehensive plan.¹ Local governments in many states are not required to prepare and adopt local comprehensive plans. This narrative may help those planning staffs argue more persuasively for funding and undertaking local comprehensive planning efforts — even when not required to do so.

Overarching Rationale

Why do local governments plan for the future? If leaders do not have a clear vision for their city's future, it's unlikely the community will become the place its residents want it to be. Comprehensive plans therefore begin with visions crafted after input from citizens and community leaders. A comprehensive plan considers a long-range horizon of 20 years or more. We refer to the long-range plan as comprehensive because it considers the interrelatedness of functions in the community and ties all major aspects of community functions together so they work in harmony and without conflict.

Planning for People

Planning is fundamentally about people — particularly, where they live. We need to understand the various characteristics of the people in the community now, as well as anticipate the likely characteristics of the people who will move into the community in the future.

Population change is the most fundamental issue to address in the comprehensive plan. The population of the community will stabilize, grow or decline, or even experience phases of both growth and decline over time. Communities cannot plan adequately unless there is information regarding how many new residents will live in the city or how many will leave. Once determined, projections of future population help determine the nature of demands on municipal facilities such as schools, parks, police, and water supplies. Those demands may differ based on the age composition of the community's population and other variables. Comprehensive plans are therefore based on substantial analysis of existing characteristics of the population, such as age, race, ethnicity, income, and educational attainment, since these variables can have important influences on future community needs and desires.

Planning for Places to Live

Nothing touches people more than the things that impact their homes and neighborhoods. People have preferences about how they live, and there is a diversity of preferences. People and households are not always able to match their preferences with their economic means. If the population is projected to grow, new housing units will be needed. Based on the amount of population increase anticipated during the 20-year planning horizon, planners project the number of new housing units that will be needed. But it is not enough to simply anticipate the total number of housing units needed. Planners and community leaders must determine, based on community input and society's needs, the types of housing that should be built in the future. Comprehensive plans are therefore based on detailed analyses of many aspects about the community's housing stock, such as the mix of types of units (detached, apartment, etc.), age, condition, and cost/affordability. In addition to households living in housing units, some members of the community will live in nursing homes and other forms of "group quarters" housing. While much smaller in terms of the total population than the household population, the group quarters population needs to be accommodated to the extent it will increase during the planning horizon.

Planning for Places to Work and the Economy

People need places to work. In any given community, usually about half of the population is of working age, generally defined as being between the ages of 16 to 64. These folks form the labor force of the community, and they seek employment within or outside the community. The extent to which jobs are available is critical to the quality of life of any community. If jobs are abundant, the economy tends to prosper, and people are attracted to the community. If jobs for the local labor force do not exist, residents will have to commute outside the community for work or move to different towns altogether for employment opportunities. The comprehensive plan, therefore, gives consideration to the future capacity for employment and the types of jobs needed in the community (e.g., manufacturing, retail, service, etc.). In short, maintaining a community's quality of life depends on keeping the local economy vibrant and growing, with suitable employment opportunities.

Planning to Protect the Natural Environment

Communities function within the natural environment and its limitations. It is inappropriate to build in certain parts of the community because they will flood, or they have conditions that are not conducive to development, like steep slopes, wetlands, poor soils, and high water tables. Comprehensive plans are based on inventories of hazardous areas like floodplains, and such plans contain policies to protect land from dangerous land-development practices and to safeguard life and property. Development can also lead to unhealthy conditions if not properly regulated. Clean air and clean water are critical to the quality of life in any community, so local leaders — as well as higher levels of government — establish policies to protect those resources as development occurs. Such regulations include flood hazard reduction ordinances, water quality rules, and land-development restrictions, among many others.

Planning for Compatibility, Character, Form, Efficiency and Aesthetics

The way different land uses are located, arranged, and interact with one another is critically important and is therefore addressed in detail in local comprehensive plans. Everyone wants a neighborhood with relative peace and quiet. That peace and quiet, as well as quality of life and enjoyment, in residential neighborhoods is a fundamental purpose of land-use planning and regulation. Industries and businesses, if located close to homes, can create noise, odor, unsafe conditions, and other unwanted characteristics such as unsightliness. Communities pass zoning regulations to ensure that land-use impacts of one site do not degrade the quality of life of those living nearby. In doing so, there is a tendency to separate homes from businesses and industries, and there are several good reasons why such separation is appropriate.

However, the strict separation of different land-use types has led to a reliance on cars for mobility. If communities continue to separate homes from workplaces and institutions, they are ensuring continued reliance on the automobile. Communities with high quality of life also enable residents to safely walk or bike to destinations such as schools, parks, or corner stores. A community with safe sidewalks and bike lanes can lead to more active residents, and when residents are more active, studies show they tend to be healthier.² For these reasons, the comprehensive plan includes detailed land-use plans and policies that guide how a community's neighborhoods, businesses, institutions, industries, community facilities, and open spaces will be physically arranged in ways that meet the community's objectives for healthy, safe, high-quality built environments.

There is also an important "efficiency" consideration in planning future land-use arrangements. Land is a resource, not just a commodity. The arrangement of land uses can result in efficient use of land, or inefficient and wasteful land consumption. Communities can be spread out at low densities or arranged in a more compact form with higher densities. Communities have to determine their own desired balance in terms of density and intensity of land uses. Too much compactness can lead to congestion and crowding. Too much dispersal can make walking, biking, and public transit use difficult, if not impossible. It also can make the extension of water and sewer lines or the building of schools inefficient. The vision of the community and the land-use plan help community leaders make decisions about where to allow intensive development and where more spacious living environments are desired and appropriate.

More needs to be said about the goal of achieving efficient community form. In setting forth community goals, the rights and desires of individual households are of paramount importance. But local government officials have an obligation to keep taxes as low as possible while providing the proper mix of community facilities and services residents need. If housing and neighborhood patterns are allowed to be dictated solely by the market, or by individual preferences, an inefficient development pattern is likely to result, costing all taxpayers in the long run. The individual preferences of households must therefore be mediated with considerations of how to grow efficiently to keep costs and tax burdens as low as possible.

People have strong social, emotional, historical, and visual connections to their community. As communities grow and change, those connections can be maintained and enhanced, or they can be lost or irrevocably damaged. Residents want to remember parts of their past. Buildings, sites, and institutions that have been around for many decades contribute in important ways to people's receptiveness to and acceptance of their surroundings. For these reasons, comprehensive plans consider the history of the community and the resources that make up the community's heritage. Plans also articulate the community's objectives regarding which parts of the community will be retained and preserved to link future generations with the community's past.

Citizens also are concerned about the way the community looks — how clean it is, whether there is too much visual clutter, and how nice or unsightly buildings and land developments look to the eye. The way a community looks affects the way residents and visitors perceive its "feel" and character. Comprehensive plans therefore pay attention to the aesthetics of buildings and land developments, and community leaders are in their right mind (and on solid legal footing) to be concerned about the way the community looks and feels. After all, the vitality of the local economy depends in large part on how well-received the community is by visitors and customers, as well as local residents. A community cannot achieve a high quality of life if it ignores its visual character or neglects to maintain attachment to its heritage.

Planning for Community Facilities

As noted above, future population levels translate into new housing needs and more demand for businesses and other workplaces. Local governments must also carefully consider the community facilities and services that will be needed to accommodate population growth. New pressures of growth create a need for road improvements, additional fire stations, more schools, expanded water systems, larger sewer treatment plants, more government personnel in various departments, and expansion of many other different services like mental health, social services, libraries, and hospitals. Some facilities are provided by cities, while others are provided by counties, special districts, or a higher level of government. The local comprehensive plan must carefully consider these future needs of the community, how they will be delivered, who will provide the service, and how they will be financed.

Financing community facilities and services is critically important. If a community plans for more facilities like schools and water treatment than it needs to meet its future population, then it has been wasteful in its spending of taxes and other revenues. On the other hand, if the community does not adequately anticipate its facility needs, overcrowding can result (e.g., overflowing classrooms leading to use of portable trailers at schools, or an inability to schedule all teams to play on ball fields). Or worse yet, new employment-generating land uses might be precluded from locating in the community if water and sewer services are unavailable or insufficiently sized. Communities must make smart choices about investing in new infrastructure, as well as in maintaining or replacing existing facilities. When mistakes are made in facility planning, they are among the most costly a community can make. And such mistakes are largely irreversible.

Preparing to Cooperate and Coordinate within the Larger Community

Local residents and businesses are a part of a larger community – the region. People have allegiance to their own community, but they must also recognize that the community is part of the county (or other substate political administrative unit) and the larger region beyond. Just like the United States can no longer consider itself isolated in a growing international world economy, it is increasingly true that local communities cannot operate without communication, cooperation, or, at minimum, coordination with regional entities to plan ahead, protect resources, and serve the needs of the people. Planning problems cross the local boundaries and therefore necessitate collaboration with other governments with jurisdiction in the region. Sometimes, what may be in the "parochial" or local interests of the community may not be best for the region as a whole.

The comprehensive plan therefore suggests how different local governments will work together to deliver all facilities, services, and programs the community will need over time. As most residents realize, coordinating the facilities, services, and programs of different local governments and services is not easy and can lead to contention and conflict. The comprehensive plan is the best way to help reduce (if not avoid) conflict and to ensure that different service providers, units of local government, and regional planning and service provision agencies work toward the same objectives.

Conclusion

In this time of budget cuts and other belt-tightening measures, local comprehensive planning may be viewed by elected officials as a luxury rather than a necessity. Planners need to guard against the belief that local comprehensive plans are just documents on shelves. By using planning jargon and omitting easily understandable rationales for foresight and action from those plans, planners may be contributing to the plan's own lack of utility. Planners who explicitly convey the purposes of planning may increase the likelihood that community leaders will fund local comprehensive planning efforts. Clearer rationales for planning may dissuade decision makers from chopping planning budgets or eliminating those budget lines altogether. Articulating the rationales provided here and others may aid local planners in that regard.

Jerry Weitz is associate professor and director of the urban and regional planning program at East Carolina University. His firm, Jerry Weitz & Associates, Inc., has prepared numerous comprehensive plans for local governments, mostly in Georgia. His most recent local government planning effort was a small area plan for South Mills Village in Camden County, N.C., with students from his land-use planning class.

Notes

 1. This narrative is adapted from the "community agenda" (comprehensive plan) for the City of Cumming, Georgia (2012), and material from the Jackson County, Georgia, Comprehensive Plan, Community Assessment Summary Report (2009), both prepared by Jerry Weitz & Associates, Inc.

2. See generally, Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Health, Well-being, and Sustainability, edited by Andrew L. Dannenberg, Howard Frumkin, and Richard J. Jackson. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2011.