Waterville council reviews draft 2025 comprehensive plan; formal adoption scheduled for October

Glenn Veil, a consultant with Reveille of Bowling Green, Ohio, presented the draft City of Waterville 2025 comprehensive plan to council on Monday, outlining the process used to update the 2012 plan and the strategies staff and volunteers recommend for the city’s next decade of growth. "Our goal is to help make communities be more prosperous and resilient and connected," Veil told council.

The plan matters because it provides a framework for land use, infrastructure, parks and transportation decisions that council will use to set priorities and budget requests. Veil said outreach included three surveys — a community survey, a student survey and a community-preferences survey — and that the process generated about 900 total responses, including 544 community survey responses and 95 student responses.

Veil described a four-phase project with ongoing community outreach, and said the plan is organized into functional sections — population and demographics, community services and facilities, neighborhoods and housing, economic development, infrastructure, transportation and land use — and smaller planning-area analyses. He said the consultant team matched strategies with likely implementing parties and categorized actions by short-, medium- and long-term timing.

Council members praised the outreach and thoroughness but said they would not adopt the plan that night. Mayor Timothy G. Pedro said the document would be reviewed and brought back for consideration. Council member Mary Duncan, who served on the advisory committee, said she would bring suggested tweaks to the timing categories and work with the committee as the council phases implementation. John Rozick and Wayne Wagner affirmed the plan’s role as a roadmap and noted the parks master-plan work already under way that would flow from the comprehensive plan.

Next steps described on the dais: council will review the draft, the parks committee will deploy its parks survey (including a QR code and printed copies planned for a late-September festival), and council is scheduled to consider ordinance 0825 (adopting the comprehensive plan) in subsequent readings with a public hearing and final action scheduled for Oct. 13. Council members urged that the advisory committee that helped produce the plan be engaged in future plan reviews.

The plan is concise, Veil said, at under 100 pages, and includes 44 discrete strategies across three themes (vibrant community, infrastructure and community services, and connected community). Council indicated it will examine the plan before formally adopting it and will try to align budget timelines with initial implementation items.

For now, council members asked staff to circulate the draft widely and to prepare ordinance 0825 and associated documents for the scheduled readings.