Edmond council reviews comprehensive-plan update emphasizing housing, mobility and urban forestry

Edmond City Council heard a workshop presentation Sept. 22 on a proposed update to the city’s comprehensive plan that adds a new housing chapter, renames the transportation chapter “mobility” to reflect EdmondShift recommendations, and consolidates urban-forestry work into a utilities and natural-resources chapter.

“I'm Hannah Nolan, long range planner with City of Edmond,” Hannah Nolan said at the start of her presentation, which summarized how three recent studies — EdmondShift (2022), the 2023 housing assessment and the 2023 forest composition and ecosystem analysis — are being incorporated into the plan update.

The update adds a dedicated housing chapter after the housing assessment found Edmond will need nearly 9,000 new housing units over the next 10 years to meet projected demand and reported that about three out of four Edmond workers live outside the city and commute in daily. Nolan summarized four strategies carried into the plan: make it easier to build housing, diversify housing types and price points, improve older housing and preserve affordability, and support workforce housing. Nolan said the plan also adds five new housing actions, including strengthening homebuyer assistance and rehabilitation programs, improving housing resources and management, and modernizing zoning to allow more housing types by right.

The mobility chapter incorporates EdmondShift priorities and a “people first” priority pyramid that places pedestrians and bicycles ahead of transit and vehicles. Nolan said the plan replaces five older transportation goals with seven new goals pulled from EdmondShift and adds 18 transportation- and mobility-related actions, including updating street standards, retrofitting dangerous four-lane undivided road segments, expanding the bike network, and adopting a prioritized project list to guide funding.

“EdmondShift reinforced the community's demand for safe, convenient and multimodal transportation,” Nolan said, noting the update aligns the plan with the city’s Vision Zero commitment to reduce serious roadway injuries and fatalities.

On urban forestry, the forest composition study reported a roughly 1% increase in tree canopy over 10 years, bringing Edmond’s canopy coverage to almost 39%. The update moves forestry items into the renamed utilities and natural-resources chapter and adds a dedicated forestry goal plus six forestry actions, including conducting a full inventory of public trees and preparing an urban-forest master plan and long-term management plan.

Council members and staff discussed how the comprehensive-plan update links to the pending Unified Development Code (UDC) rewrite. Planning Director Ken Bridal told the council the UDC project team will hold a joint workshop Oct. 27 (planning commission and council) to provide a progress check-in; Bridal said the code text will remain a work in progress and that broader public engagement and more refined draft code language are expected over the following months, with substantive public review and opportunities for feedback through the winter into about March.

Council members pressed staff on several implementation points raised in the update: how actions will be tracked (Nolan said an appendix and an annual progress table list lead departments, estimated start years and status); whether new street standards apply citywide or by plan category (staff said standards would be targeted to plan categories and existing infrastructure); and how asset classes such as curbs, gutters and drainage will be assessed and managed (engineering staff said stormwater is being inventoried as a separate asset class and that assessments will be added over time).

Council discussion also focused on two policy topics highlighted in the update: transfer of development rights (TDR) and the prevalence of planned-unit developments (PUDs). Nolan described TDR as a mechanism to preserve trees and sensitive areas by crediting development intensity in other parts of the city, and staff said the city is considering the idea but has not drafted code language; staff noted TDR is more common in Colorado and is not known to be in use elsewhere in Oklahoma. Several council members urged that the development code update be prioritized because the current code drives many projects to seek PUDs.

Nolan told council the recommended next steps are final acceptance of the comp-plan update in October, establishment of recurring staff and board trainings to keep the plan in use, and an annual progress report that lists completed, ongoing and not-started actions in appendix B. “We maintain a detailed appendix that records milestones, completed plans and progress toward each action and recommendations,” she said.

The meeting concluded with a routine motion to adjourn, which was seconded and adopted by voice vote.