HomeMy WebLinkAboutSupplement 10-28-19-A Memo to PB- 191027MEMORANDUM
TO: Planning Board Members
FROM: Hap Happel
SUBJECT: Revised Community Development Plan
DATE: October 27,2019
I have had a crack at revising the draft of the Community Development Plan to
implement the major decisions made at last Tuesday's meeting and to try to improve the
readability of the Plan overall. More specifically:
l. I have reorgeni2sd the Chapters of the Plaq putting the Themes chapter before Future
Land Use and putting Future Land Use before Implementation.
2.lhave tried to re-order the first part of the Plan in a more logical fashion: a) The
opening sections of the Plan have been shortened. In particular, per the Board's desire
(mine too!), I have removed the Land Use Principles section and included most of the
language and all of the concepts into the "Importance" subsection of appropriate Themes.
However, I retained in the first part of the Plan the less-than-one-page description of the
principles derived from the ideas in the *Land Use Principles" section of the consultant's
draft (see Chapter 1, Page 11 of the consultant's draft). In the new draft, these are in a
section entitled "Principles Applied in this Plan." b) I have substantially shortened the
discussion of public input by relegating most of it to an Appendix. c) I have also
shortened the description of existing conditions and referred readers to an Appendix with
the EPS report. d) There are now paragraphs specifically addressing growth and
affordable housing, the later utilizing language provided by Jen and Cathy and now
including, per the Board's desire, a description of the high-level objectives in the
Community Housing Plan.
3. In the Themes section, because many of the Objectives are really actions, and because
in too many cases Actions didn't support Objectives, I have combined the Objectives and
Actions and tried to order these in a more logical fashion.
4. I've also tried to implement other decisions made at last Tuesday's planning board
meeting by replacing "land use" with "community planning" where appropriate, and
emphasizing, in the land use description entitled "Currently Inappropriate for Urban
Development," that no city services will be provided to these areas. I have no! however,
tried to draft language describing how the major City plans interact with one another or
developed an executive sunmary that could be a stand-alone document for public
consumption.
5. Finally, throughout the document I have tried to improve the language to increase
clarity and eliminate unnecessary words.
None of these revisions were intended to change the substance of the Plan.
The revised Plarl let's call it "Plan II," is enclosed with this Memo. Also enclosed is a
Word Compare document comparing Plan II with the consultant's draft Plan. (Let's call
that one "Plan I.") The Compare document unfortunately is not very helpful because it
shows as new text (red) a raft of language that was in Plan I but that has been moved. If
you do look at this Compare document, a good rule of thumb is that if the red text is more
than a complete sentence or two, it's text that was in Plan I but has been moved.* Shorter
red text typically reflects my lvordsmithing. That being said, I think the much beffer way
to approach Plan II is to just read the clean version, not the compare version.
I will make two assertions about Plan II:
-It still needs a lot of work.
-It nonetheless enables us to focus more clearly on the substance of the Plan and we
therefore should use it going forward for our discussions.
\*-la-
'There are some exceptions--Jen and Cathy's language we discussed last Tuesday, the section on growth
that I drafted, a new first sentence at the beginning ofthe Plan.