A major overhaul of the La Plata County comprehensive plan, which hasn’t been updated since 2001, is down to the final few chapters – expected to be completed in the spring.
County commissioners last week reviewed the past several months’ worth of updates. Updates are first approved by the Planning Commission before going to county commissioners for final approval.
Planning Commission Chairman Jim Tencza noted, as he often has, that the comp plan is advisory, not regulatory. “It should be a roadmap for all county residents,” he said. Use of words like “shall,” “will” and “must” should be minimized in the comp plan, he said.
County Planning Director Damian Peduto said, “The comp plan condenses long-range planning efforts into one document. Implementation is through regulatory means. Those have various forms. The most common is the land-use code. Those will follow many of the (comp plan) policies, which talk about managing growth. That’s not necessarily limiting. It’s how we create growth where we can maintain infrastructure.”
County Commissioner Brad Blake had concerns that “the ‘shall,’ ‘will’ and ‘must’ don’t get put in this document, but it seems like to the Planning Department, it’s a ‘shall,’ ‘will’ and ‘must’ type of document.” He cited clustering and said, “Nobody really knows what it means.” He worries about the cost and time for applicants to get through the land-use approval process.
Tencza said there was a lot of talk about clustering in the 2011 comp plan that was never adopted. Some of that is in the new plan, along with encouraging development in places that already have infrastructure, he said. “If you don’t have anything about it in the document, it’s coming out of nowhere,” he said.
Peduto said clustering is one of various tools listed in the land-use chapter (element) to achieve desired outcomes. “Using clustering means concentrating development onto one section of a larger property, leaving a vast area of open space,” he said. “It can protect watershed, viewshed, provide a buffer. There are other things that have to be used with clustering to be effective. It’s not something that can be used with every project. ... There will be a lot of incentives and encouragements.”
He added, “This guides us toward (land-use) codes that will create a better process.” The county is just starting on a new land-use code.
Peduto noted reference to “right to farm” in the agriculture element of the comp plan, “that growth shouldn’t impact existing farms.” In the land-use code, that includes buffers between agriculture land and rural subdivisions, site planning, easements and clustering with open space as a buffer. “All these methods of implementation get considered following the policy,” Peduto said.
Tencza noted that some topics got only a couple paragraphs in the 2001 comp plan. Those have been “fleshed out. There was fill-in as well as updating.”
Planning commissioners have been meeting the first Thursday each month since early 2015 to update the 2001 comp plan. The planning commission’s focus this Thursday will be public safety.
The comp plan update finishes in 2017 with historic preservation, which the county’s Historic Preservation Commission has been working on, and recreation/tourism. Peduto said historic preservation will be new to the plan, not an update of existing topics.
Once the comp plan updates are complete, attention will turn to district area plans, most dating back to the late 1990s, that are part of the comp plan appendix.
Tencza said planning commissioners should review and update the finished comp plan periodically, “so it’s a living document.”
Peduto added, “It should be re-visited annually at least.”
