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Newport News staff outlines timeline and public outreach for comprehensive plan update
Summary
City staff presented a status update on the "One City, Our Future 2040" comprehensive plan, citing public outreach rounds, new interactive visuals, and an aim to deliver a draft by year-end; council members asked about coordination with the city's strategic housing work.
Brian Swetz, assistant director for comprehensive planning, told the Newport News City Council at its July 22 work session that staff is drafting an update to the city's comprehensive plan, "One City, Our Future 2040." "I'd like to talk to you today a little bit about the update for our comprehensive plan," Swetz said, and summarized completed outreach, demographic analysis and the next steps for public review.
Swetz told the council the comprehensive plan is "designed to promote the planned and orderly development of land," and noted that the Code of Virginia requires every locality to maintain a comprehensive plan and update it at least every five years. He said staff has completed two rounds of public outreach across all three council districts and plans a third round in September or October to review the draft goals, strategies and the future land use map.
The presentation emphasized new, more visual and interactive formats for the plan. Swetz described examples from other cities that reduce narrative on pages, include interactive navigation and link to related materials such as design standards. "We think that by limiting the amount of narrative, it helps what's there to pop out more, and we can focus on analysis and not telling you. We can show you instead," he said.
Councilman Long asked how the comprehensive plan will align with the city's Strategic Housing Initiative Plan. "So are y'all making sure that everything will overlap? We wanna know that it won't be any, difference in of tactics or strategies that are going forward," Long said. Swetz replied, "Yes. Terry and I have been talking extensively about this. Housing is going to be very big focus in the comprehensive plan, and so we wanna make sure that we are capturing what is in the strategic housing plan and that we're not working at cross purposes." (Terry is referenced in the presentation but not otherwise identified in the transcript.)
Swetz said staff hopes to provide the council the completed plan before the end of the calendar year, describing that timeline as "still a pretty aggressive time frame" but that the project remains on track. He asked council members to review the draft goals and strategies and the focus area map and provide feedback.
The work session was brief and primarily informational; Swetz stood by for questions after the presentation.
